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Published in 1987, Not Without My Daughter was written by American housewife Betty Mahmoody. She claimed that she and her five-year-old daughter had been kidnapped from the USA in 1984 and imprisoned in Tehran by her Iranian husband, Dr Sayed Mahmoody, a man she branded as a violent, sadistic monster. Betty’s story culminated in their dramatic escape from Iran over the Zagros Mountains and into Turkey. NWMD sold 12 million copies. In 1991 a Hollywood film based on the book starring Oscar-winner Sally Field made $30million.
For twenty years Betty’s husband has kept silent. Now, in Lost Without My Daughter Sayed finally tells the astonishing truth; that Betty executed a plan worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller to rob him of their daughter and $1million fortune
Lost Without My Daughter, narrated by Sayed, tells the incredible story of how he was psychologically and then physically abused by Betty before she encouraged him to return to Iran after twenty years of practising medicine in the US to treat soldiers injured in the Iran-Iraq war. Days after his green-card expired she fled Terhan on a Swissair Flight with their daughter. Within weeks she had claimed all their US assets (totalling $1m), divorced Sayed and filed a restraining order against him. Sayed was helpless, trapped in Iran where he was forced to fight for his freedom and his very life against the dreaded secret police - all because he was married to an American.
Their incredible story is set against the background of tumultuous change - the Iranian revolution which installed the Ayatollah, the Iran-Iraq war (in which America sided with Iraq and in which Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of civilians) and the American Embassy hostage crisis.
LWMD is an exercise in truth, the last-ditch attempt of a father desperate to reach his daughter, to let her know that he is not the monster he has been portrayed to be.
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