An Iranian exile group colluded with university officials and a state lawmaker in Arkansas in a relentless, ultimately successful campaign to get an Iranian American professor fired, according to a new lawsuit.
Shirin Saeidi, a tenured professor of political science at the University of Arkansas was removed from her post as the director of the school’s King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies in December over social media posts critical of Israel — a move that a national free-speech group criticized in a letter to the university.
Despite a unanimous vote by a faculty committee recommending her reinstatement, Saeidi was fired from the university in March, a decision that was upheld in May after an appeal by the professor.
The firing came after a monthslong campaign by the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists, an Iranian American group opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The group lobbied the university with accusations that Saeidi was working on behalf of the Iranian government and allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University — both of which Saeidi has strenuously denied.
“When someone tries to take everything from you, and your identity, your scholarship, your entire labor of your adult life through framing you and lying to the media — it works,” Saeidi told The Intercept. “It makes people doubt you, and this is the big issue with defamation. So it’s been shocking to experience it, but I was not surprised.”
The 15-count suit seeks to void Saeidi’s termination and award her back pay and damages. It also aims to overturn Act 721, a law signed in April 2025 by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, which allows the state to cut off public funds to any academic institution found to have allowed or failed to act against antisemitism.
“This law is a really good example of a limitation on free speech disguised as equal protection.”
Ultimately, it was that mechanism of state authority — combined with pressure on the university from a state senator — that appears to have driven Saeidi’s dismissal, according to Badria Mryyan, one of the attorneys representing her.
“This law is a really good example of a limitation on free speech disguised as equal protection,” Mryyan said. “Act 721 is a deterrent of free speech and a deterrent of academic freedom, and it’s clear to us that the university had a real fear response to any mention of Act 721, but particularly when it was coming from legislators.”
The drive to get Saeidi fired from her job came amid a broader push to target Iranian and Iranian American academics and journalists — one that for years has featured violent death threats and highly personal attacks on people arguing for diplomacy with the Iranian government.
With President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, however, these attacks have gained more purchase as they dovetailed with the administration’s focus on left-wing and pro-Palestine academics and activists.
“This is a case of a person expressing their viewpoints on their own personal Twitter pages, and when an investigation was conducted to see if they violated university rules, the university employees said no,” said Leonard Bright, a professor of public service and administration at Texas A&M. “For the university president to come and override that, that’s highly disturbing, and it compromises the faculty member’s freedom to speak her mind about issues of public concern. And that reaction is certainly going to chill other faculty members’ willingness to address difficult topics.”
“I No Longer Feel Safe”
The campaign against Saeidi was spearheaded by Lawdan Bazargan, who is listed as the AAIRIA’s director in publicly filed documents, according to the lawsuit.
The organization, which describes itself as a “group of former political prisoners in Iran, families of executed political prisoners, human rights activists who work (seeking) justice and accountability,” has mounted a number of similar campaigns against Iranian and Iranian American academics and journalists who it accuses of supporting the Iranian government.
In a statement to The Intercept, Bazargan rejected the idea that she had conspired with others to secure Saeidi’s termination.
“I categorically deny the allegations that I defamed Dr. Shirin Saeidi or participated in any secret conspiracy or collusion with Benjamin Weinthal, Senator Dan Sullivan, or University of Arkansas officials to have her terminated,” Bazargan wrote. “The suggestion that there was some coordinated conspiracy among us is simply false. We publicly raised concerns and asked institutions, elected officials, and journalists to examine them. What they chose to do afterward was entirely their decision.”
Fired from her job, forced to defend herself against allegations of serious misconduct, Saeidi said her life has been upended by the campaign against her.
“This is really damaging to not just my career, but to my life,” she said. “I had to leave Arkansas because I no longer feel safe. People that go to my child’s school, people that I see at the grocery store, people that see me at the gym — they think I’m a terrorist.”
“People that go to my child’s school, people that I see at the grocery store, people that see me at the gym — they think I’m a terrorist.”
Now, Saeidi is hitting back with the lawsuit. In the 88-page complaint filed Monday evening in federal court in Arkansas, Saeidi and her lawyers accused the Iranian American pressure group, university officials, GOP state Sen. Dan Sullivan, and Jerusalem-based pro-Israel pundit Ben Weinthal of colluding in a defamatory conspiracy against her right to free speech motivated by Islamophobia and a desire to stamp out pro-Palestine speech.
“Dr. Shirin Saeidi, because of her work in her field and her advocacy and protected speech, was subject to a coordinated harassment campaign that was able to take advantage of a broader attack on academic freedom at the federal and state levels,” said Connor Thompson, one of the attorneys representing Saeidi. “We are hoping to vindicate the rights of our client, who has really had her life ruined.”
Neither a spokesperson for the University of Arkansas nor Dan Sullivan, the state senator named in the lawsuit, responded to requests for comment.
Raft of Allegations
Bazargan began targeting Saeidi on March 24, 2025, by submitting a formal complaint to the chancellor of the University of Arkansas. The following day, Bazargan appeared on an Israeli news program accusing Saeidi and other professors in the U.S. of supporting the Iranian government.
The group’s accusations against Saeidi initially centered on the professor’s testimony in a Swedish trial against an Iranian official accused of having a hand in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988. Bazargan’s brother, she said, was killed in the mass execution.
In the ensuing months, Bazargan wrote numerous letters to university officials, many of which she posted online, accusing Saeidi of expressing “open admiration for Iran’s Supreme Leader” and being “ideologically aligned with Hezbollah” — a federally designated terror group.
As the months went on, Bazargan widened the scope of her allegations to accuse Saeidi of committing plagiarism and other scholarly sins while working on her doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, work that was later published as a book on the condition of women in the Islamic Republic.
In an interview with The Intercept, Saeidi said she took particular issue with accusations that she had downplayed human rights violations by the Iranian government or that she had committed plagiarism or other academic misconduct in her research.
“In my book, I actually document the human rights violations of the 1980 to ’88 period,” Saeidi said. “I interview women and men who were in prison at that time, and I listen to their stories. There is absolutely no denial on my part that there were human rights violations that occurred from 1980 to ’88, and that people suffered unjustly because of it.”
In the lawsuit, Saeidi accuses Bazargan of working with Ben Weinthal, a pro-Israel pundit who works with Fox News, the New York Post, and the Saudi-funded Iran International news channel. In the campaign against Saeidi, her lawsuit alleges, “the two agreed that he would press the University for an investigation and publish the accusations.”
Weinthal was previously a writer for the Jerusalem Post, has been a fellow at one of Washington’s most hawkish pro-Israel think tanks, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and is currently a fellow at the Middle East Forum, a think tank that publishes a list of “Professors to Avoid,” tracked thousands of Muslim Americans in a secret database, and has been accused of Islamophobia.
According to the lawsuit, Weinthal communicated directly with Bazargan on May 9, 2025, and the two “agreed that he would press the University for an investigation and publish the accusations.”
On the same day, he reached out to the university in the form of a Fox News press inquiry about the allegations against Saeidi, pressing the university chancellor and communications office on the matter again on May 21.
Weinthal did not appear to publish an article about Saeidi until nearly seven months later, when he co-authored a December 13 story for the New York Post about her removal from her director position at the Middle East studies center. Though he does not appear to have ever published an article about Saeidi for Fox News, he has written or co-authored at least five more articles about her for Iran International and the New York Post since last December.
“I stand by my investigative journalism about Ms. Saeidi,” Weinthal said in response to a request for comment from The Intercept about the allegations in the lawsuit.
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Shifting Target
In late 2025, as Bazargan and her allies continued to lobby university officials and trustees, the focus shifted from allegations of support for Iran to accusations of antisemitism, purportedly in social media posts by Saeidi about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The tack was well considered: Earlier in the year, Arkansas had passed a law targeting alleged antisemitic speech at public universities. Though the university’s own Title IX coordinator had found no evidence of antisemitism by Saeidi, she thinks this was the line of attack that ultimately doomed her.
According to the lawsuit, the university removed Saeidi from her position as director of the Middle East studies center under pressure from Sullivan, the Republican state senator, And, in March, the university terminated her entirely, a decision upheld in May.
For her part, Saeidi said she is fighting not just for herself, but also for academics everywhere who might also invite scrutiny for speaking out on controversial issues.
“I don’t think that what’s been done to me can be undone,” she said, “but it’s my hope that what comes of this lawsuit is that it never happens to another academic.”
Bazargan, for her part, has not let up. In the months following Saeidi’s termination, she has tweeted about Saeidi dozens of times, calling her “fake doctor lady” and repeating accusations of plagiarism and support for the Iranian government. As things became heated, Saeidi posted a number of videos online containing harsh insults against Bazargan.
Bazargan, according to an email viewed by The intercept, reported Saeidi’s online barbs to the FBI.