A Jewish woman who says she spent years engaging with senior figures linked to Iran’s ruling establishment has shared what she describes as insider accounts from those interactions in a sit-down interview with Iran International.
Catherine Perez-Shakdam, a French-born Jewish woman, offers a portrait of a political system she says is driven less by confidence than by a fear of collapse.
She says she gained rare access to Iran’s political and ideological circles after presenting herself as a sympathetic Western voice critical of the United States and Israel.
Over time, she says, that posture opened doors to senior officials in Tehran, including the late president Ebrahim Raisi, senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Perez-Shakdam said her access was neither incidental nor accidental, but carefully cultivated.
“(I wanted) to make myself into somebody that the regime would want to invite, someone that they would see as useful and an asset for them.”
‘Nobody stopped me’
Much of that access, she said, flowed through the late filmmaker and propagandist Nader Talebzadeh, a central figure in Tehran’s state-aligned media and conference circuit.
According to Perez-Shakdam, Talebzadeh’s patronage effectively removed institutional barriers.
“So Nader gave me, you know, the absolute pass in that I had been vetted by him and therefore nobody could touch me,” she said. “Nobody could stop me at the airport. I could do whatever. I mean, whatever.”
That freedom, she said, allowed her to move through Iran in ways rarely permitted to Westerners, even those with journalistic credentials, and offered a window into Tehran’s power politics.
The structure of the Islamic Republic, Perez-Shakdam argues, reflects deep insecurity within the leadership, particularly since repeated waves of mass protest have challenged its legitimacy.
‘They fear the people’
She said that fear was most visible in what she was told about the 2009 Green Movement, when millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Perez-Shakdam said an insider described to her a moment during that unrest when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei appeared visibly emotional in public, pointing to footage from the period as the state faced what he described as an existential crisis.
“He told me that it was the day that the regime almost fell,” she said. “That they were so close and that the people did not realize just how close (Khamenei) was from losing everything.”
She said the episode left a lasting psychological imprint on Iran’s leadership.
“They are terrified of the people, which is why you see the repression that you see in the streets,” Perez-Shakdam said.
‘A god among men’
Perez-Shakdam also recalled being brought into the presence of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, describing the encounter as carefully staged to project dominance rather than invite dialogue.
She said Khamenei did most of the talking and appeared intent on asserting intellectual and moral authority.
“I think he just wanted to impress upon me that, you know, he was a god among men.”
One exchange, she said, left a particularly lasting impression.
“The first thing he asked me was whether or not I thought that God was genocidal,” she said. “I looked at him and I was like, no, obviously not.”
She said Khamenei then compared deaths ordered by the state to a natural cycle of life, suggesting that killing in service of the Islamic Republic should not be considered genocide—a comparison she described as deeply disturbing.
Looking at Iran today, Perez-Shakdam argued that fear of popular revolt remains the leadership’s defining trait, particularly when it comes to women. Iranian women, she said, pose the greatest challenge to the system’s ability to control future generations.
