From New Orleans to Tehran: Life of Detained Iran Newscaster

US authorities have detained a Press TV presenter, writes Jon Gambrell for Herald-Whig

She is largely unknown in the United States. But the American anchorwoman for Iran's state-run broadcaster, detained last weekend by US authorities, is a familiar face on its English-language channel.

As a newscaster for Press TV, Marzieh Hashemi has been conducting interviews and reading the news as written by government loyalists in the Islamic Republic. It's a long way from New Orleans, where she was born Melanie Franklin in 1959 to a Christian family.

In college in Louisiana, encounters with Iranian students in the wake of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution saw her convert to Islam. A marriage brought her to Iran, where she learned fluent Farsi and began working for the country's state broadcaster 25 years ago.

Her journalism and her public comments mirror her host country's official ideology.

"When I got familiar with Islamic Revolution in Iran, and I saw it was a political and religious revolution, I was attracted to this," Hashemi once told an interviewer in Farsi. "I saw this as a political movement to the revolution."

Now, after her apparent arrest by the FBI, her family is questioning why the 59-year-old grandmother was imprisoned by the US Her detention comes at a time of escalating U.S.-Iran tensions, including President Donald Trump's maximalist approach to Iran after pulling America out of its nuclear deal.

Hashemi was detained Sunday in St. Louis, where she had filmed a Black Lives Matter documentary after visiting relatives in the New Orleans area. She was then taken to Washington by the FBI on a material witness warrant, according to her elder son, Hossein Hashemi.

The FBI said in an email that it had no comment.

Read the full article from Herald Whig