Jul 10, 2025 Society
When Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman, dressed in unrelenting black, with characteristically heavy eye makeup completing a funereal mien, shuffled her papers on the table of Select Committee Room 3 and looked up at Iranian ambassador Reza Nahar Ahari, she tried to channel a history of pain. It was early August 2023, and Ahari had been invited to appear before Parliament’s foreign affairs, defence and trade select committee by its then deputy chairperson, Gerry Brownlee — now Speaker of the House — in the wake of the domestic and international outrage following the brutal death in police custody of young Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who had been detained in September 2022 for failing to wear a hijab.
Ghahraman, whose family fled Iran and the same regime of which Ahari was a representative when she was nine years old, had never previously taken much of an active role in the New Zealand-Iranian community. But in the wake of Amini’s death and the ensuing protests, she reconnected with the community, which she describes as one of the most traumatised she has worked with. Its members, she says, often seemed to have repressed that trauma in the interests of keeping their heads down and getting ahead in Aotearoa. Generally conservative in their views, Ghahraman says, Iranian immigrants to New Zealand had not generally been inclined to publicly protest against the regime in control of the country they had left. Perhaps because of that repression, when it was given an outlet, anger flowed in torrents.
Protesting outside the Iranian Embassy on a suburban Wellington street in October 2022, she watched grown men screaming and weeping, overcome by grief and pain. One otherwise unremarkable middle-aged man, with thinning hair and running shoes, wearing a dusty-coloured jersey, sticks in her mind. “Rapists!” he screamed, over and over, at the grimy, once-white facade of the embassy. “Rapists!” Ghahraman: “It’s like, who in his family was raped? Was he raped?” There was, she says, just “that much hurt. People coming out with their own hurt and yelling it endlessly.” Others burned hijabs or Iranian passports.
Nine months later, in the select committee meeting room, some of that anger sat behind her eyes. She also tried to bring her own family’s pain. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had ascended to power as supreme leader of Iran a couple of years before Ghahraman was born; her childhood there took place in the context of increasing enforcement of the regime’s stultifying laws and a barbarous war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hundreds of thousands died at the front of that conflict, even as her parents tried to make her home in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, a sanctuary, where her dad brewed illegal booze in the basement and threw parties for like-minded friends. But the threat of disappearing into Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison hung heavy, a threat transmitted to Ghahraman by way of whispered but still overheard conversations. One of her best friend’s cousins was arrested as a 16-year-old for spray painting anti-regime graffiti. He was executed, and his distraught family was notified of his death only months later, the authorities having accepted in the interim the letters and care packages sent by them.
Yet fleeing that regime, and then being accepted as refugees in New Zealand, came with its own set of griefs: Ghahraman’s high-achieving and highly educated parents, once at the centre of a busy social scene, were forced to eke out much humbler livelihoods. There has been a sad parade of family funerals — aunts, uncles, grandparents — for which no one could return for fear of the consequences. Ghahraman watched her parents seem to lose the vibrancy of their old personalities as they struggled to rebuild their lives in a new country and a new language. Her father, she writes in her 2020 memoir Know Your Place, was known in Iran for his humour and an infectious goofiness, but in New Zealand he’d had to settle for smiling politely as conversations he didn’t understand swirled around him. “Humour doesn’t translate so he mostly stopped trying,” Ghahraman writes.
All of that, too, occupied Ghahraman’s mind as she lifted the photo of Amini, lying in the coma from which she would never awake, towards Ahari and the cameras. She’d planned the details: what her tone would be like; the soundbites she wanted to get out for the media; that she would, for the benefit of Iranians, break into her mother tongue of Farsi to tell Ahari his regime was committing crimes against humanity; that she would at some point tell him to stop talking, that he wasn’t in control here. “I knew that Iranians needed to see that happen to someone from the regime,” she says.
Ghahraman had urged members of the parliamentary press gallery to attend; their reports duly described the confrontation as “fiery”, “heated” and “testy”. Chairperson Jenny Salesa interrupted to ask Ghahraman to “still be respectful”. Brownlee described it to Metro as “a performance”: “quite dramatic, not really my style, and I don’t think overly representative of the way the committee would have liked to present, but nonetheless a pretty clear demonstration of her own views”.
Activists approached by Metro have described it as a moment of bravery that gave Iranians a feeling of optimism, although there are others who dismissed it as essentially a piece of theatre. But for Dr Forough Amin, the founder of Iranian Women in NZ who was instrumental in pushing for Ahari to appear before the select committee, Ghahraman that day displayed the “genuine anger that any Iranian person or woman has towards the regime”, noting that, in its second life online, footage of the confrontation spread rapidly through the eight-million-strong Iranian diaspora. “It was the first time that we could see such a thing,” she says.
Ghahraman’s own hope was that as many Iranians as possible would see a woman humiliate a representative of the regime. But, she says, consciously channelling that anger — and immersing herself in its ballast of trauma in order to fully convey it — came with a hefty psychological price tag at a time when she was already on the verge of what she calls her “mental breakdown”. A few months after confronting Ahari, Ghahraman entered Wellington’s Cre8iveworx and stole a Zambesi shirt worth $695; later, in a three-day period leading up to Christmas 2023, she stole over $8000 worth of clothes, the majority during two incidents at high-end Ponsonby store Scotties Boutique. (On whether she has ever shoplifted outside of these incidents, Ghahraman would only say: “Legally, I would have to not answer that question. I can’t answer that question because my lawyers would be really mad at me.”) When the story first hit the headlines, a few weeks into January 2024, Ghahraman was in Cambodia on a long-planned holiday. There, amid the sudden chaos, she couldn’t stop thinking about the grin she imagined news of her offending might have brought to the lips of the Iranian ambassador. “One thing I hate the most about the disgrace I brought upon myself is that dude feeling good about it,” she says.
Ghahraman, 44, speaks matter-of-factly about that period of her life, talking several times with Metro over the summer in her favourite cafe and in her small Grey Lynn villa — uneven rimu floorboards and a neglected garden — where she sought refuge on return from Cambodia. She remembers hanging a sheet over the front window and relocating to the rear of the house when the press gathered outside, arriving in the morning and leaving only when it became too late to file for the 6pm news. “I wasn’t functioning at all,” she says, and would later be diagnosed with two varieties of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as depression and anxiety. “There was nothing you could say to me that was worse than what I was saying to myself: ‘You’re an absolute piece of shit, you’re worthless, you should just die. Do your worst, because that’s what I deserve.’”
In the chaotic days following her return to Aotearoa, that voice may have spoken with a renewed intensity, but over the preceding years a version of it had become a familiar companion, an internalisation of the constant threats of rape and death that had become a grim reality of her life ever since she announced her intention to run for Parliament at the 2017 election. When she was duly elected as a Green Party list MP, she’d already been the subject of enough abuse to make mention in her maiden speech of the numbness she’d cultivated to combat it.
But it would only increase, rising when Ghahraman fronted campaigns important to the minority communities she represented, like hate speech law reform or increasing the number of refugees New Zealand would accept. Giving those concerns equal weight and demanding for them a place in the national conversation, Ghahraman says, seemed to elicit the most deranged responses, a small selection of which her legal team submitted to the court with her sentencing submissions: “Bullet”, wrote one Facebook user in sharing a news story about Ghahraman, then later in the comments, “F@$k off back to Lebanon bitch!” “I would love to shove my big fat thick sausage down your exhaust”, commented another. “She would not at all be missed should a mishap happen”, wrote a third. According to Ghahraman, “The hate comes because we act like we belong here.”
In the analogy of Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa, formerly the research director at the now-disestablished Disinformation Project, the threats and abuse against Ghahraman since 2022 on publicly visible social media platforms would run to the length of a PhD thesis, about 100,000 words, and created an environment where physical harm was a real danger. Danny Stevens, former communications director for the Greens, who monitored MPs’ social media, has described how on “a daily basis [Ghahraman] was battling a rising tide of misogynistic abuse — from rape and death threats, to derogatory comments about her appearance and career”. Much worse, it goes without saying, was being said in darker corners of the internet. “There were very serious actual threats of sexual violence and death,” Ghahraman says. She came to require a level of security normally reserved for the prime minister.
Brownlee, the long-serving National Party MP who shares with Ghahraman an unlikely friendship despite what he calls her “crazy Green views”, says that while he always knew there was some “redneck stuff” being directed at her, he was never truly aware at the time of the level of unhinged vitriol to which the abuse rose. And Ghahraman, he says, was in a unique position. When he has received the occasional death threat, Brownlee has been able to rationalise that as “just a nutter and that in this country you’d have to go to an extraordinary amount of effort to carry something like that out”. Ghahraman, however, “comes from a background where death threats were carried out. It was part of daily life that people went missing… For her, it would have triggered thoughts of those times she was a child, knowing that people were disappearing.”
Ghahraman — once a criminal defender and an international human rights lawyer, someone who defines herself as “a fighter” by nature — tried to defy the abuse, first by trying to respond to it, then by dispassionately cataloguing it as evidence of the systemic problems she wanted to address. At other times, she tried to shrug it off but would then beat herself up for being bothered by it, thinking it showed an inherent weakness. After the 2019 Christchurch terror attacks, however, she began to feel a “palpable fear of violence in my daily life”. The voice would break in. “What’s wrong with you? You can’t even do your job. You’re feeling scared.” That self-criticism only propped open the door for more abuse to get through, which added extra venom to her internal monologue. The cycle continued.
James Shaw, the Greens’ co-leader from 2015 to 2024, told Metro that Ghahraman had been subjected to an “extraordinary level of attack” over her time in Parliament and that even at its lowest level of intensity it was more sustained and vicious than anything the vast majority of her fellow MPs ever received. Coming into the 2023 election, with the party in campaign mode and dispersed around the country, he never noticed Ghahraman struggling more than usual, noting “these sorts of things don’t often present obviously”. And that might be particularly true among parliamentarians, he says.
“It is a very, very tough working environment and personal weaknesses are exposed and exploited by other people who are trying to get ahead — and to a degree you just wouldn’t see in the vast majority of workplaces. I think that people who have physical and mental health conditions, they are generally not rewarded for being open about those things, because those will be exploited by people acting in bad faith. You do have to manage yourself very, very carefully, because it’s a very low-trust environment.”
Ghahraman says she found the Green Party to be “a very white middle-class” environment where it wasn’t always easy to bring to the table her authentic political identity, steeped in her experiences as a refugee and an Iranian. Other women of colour — famously Elizabeth Kerekere and Darleen Tana, both wāhine Māori — have also seemingly struggled in the Greens environment. Shaw admits it is “a fair question” as to whether the party had the structures in place to support all its parliamentarians. Over his near-decade at the helm, he says, the party had increasingly strived to ameliorate “the challenge of the parliamentary environment” with internal support.
He notes that Ghahraman, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018, also had a physical health condition to manage. Within the restrictions of the parliamentary schedule, the Greens did try to prioritise leave for people to “take care of their circumstances”, from health problems to young children, while also encouraging staffers and MPs to make use of the therapy offered to all parliamentarians. “You try to make the working conditions as amenable as possible to receive support. You try to make sure that professional support is available. If you notice people struggling, you have a conversation with them and [ask if] they need additional support. I feel like we got to a point where — I’ll just check how I say this — where we were doing as much as we were able to do, which is not the same thing as, ‘Was there more that we could do?’”
Ghahraman had experienced stressful work situations before. Once, while in Cambodia with the United Nations, prosecuting the Khmer Rouge for its crimes against humanity, she found herself unable to sleep and paralysed by anxiety, her hair falling out in “clumps”, as she recalls in Know Your Place. The court was dominated by men, she writes, and “persistent sexual overtures” were made towards her and younger interns, for whom she tried to devise protective strategies. Complaints were minimised and dismissed; she came to realise that a major source of her anxiety was a “hostile and unhealthy” work environment. She quit.
Ghahraman regrets not walking away from politics, too. Instead, she trudged through the 2023 election, where she felt the weirdness the pandemic had injected into the body politic — people ranting about trans women not being women at an Auckland Women Lawyers’ Association debate, among expected obscure questions about the Resource Management Act — in its full expression. Andrew Little, who while justice minister worked closely with Ghahraman in her role as the Greens’ justice spokesperson, described to Metro an election campaign, in the aftermath of the occupation of Parliament grounds in early 2022, with a tangible sense of “hostility or animosity, or an anger”. “There was some pretty nasty, evil stuff going around, and no doubt Golriz was getting the worst of it.”
After the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas, and Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza in response, Ghahraman’s outspoken support for Palestine just meant more abuse. But she ignored the warning signs of her plummeting self-esteem, even as her destructive interior voice grew more insistent. Now, she hopes her experience — in a country with high levels of gendered violence and generations of abuse in state care, with high rates of drug abuse and suicide — might help others to recognise the impact unresolved trauma could be having on their behaviour. “If we had an understanding of what it looked like, we could prevent other people from burning down their own lives.”
Ultimately, though, that is exactly what Ghahraman did. Attempting to explain her offending, she says she was seeking external proof of that voice’s veracity — “I’m crazy, see, I’m crazy; this is the evidence that I’m crazy” — while also relieving the numbness that had engulfed her, if only with the “terror and fear” that came in the wake of shoplifting, and only temporarily. She maintains there was no joy or thrill — just a dull dissociative blur. And deep, deep shame, both in the aftermath of each incident, and once the details of them were released to the world. “Can you imagine anything worse than having a failure that’s so public, and you lose everything?”
Forough Amin described how that failure rippled through the New Zealand-Iranian community. The online group of some 500 Iranian women that she moderates was full of “huge discussions” about Ghahraman in the days and weeks after her crimes came to light. “It was mostly people saying she brought shame to the whole community, even people personalising it to the extent that [some were saying], ‘Oh my God, I feel so ashamed in front of my colleagues at work. What are they are going to think of me now?’” Ghahraman’s legacy, including the important work she’d done on behalf of New Zealand-Iranians, was tarnished in the eyes of many in that community. And there was little patience, Amin said, for the MP’s mental-health-related explanations. “What she did made it difficult for people who really love the work that she did for Iran. You know, it was like losing a supporter and advocate.”
Ghahraman started working through her own shame, attending regular therapy, during a six-month period in 2024 when she felt there was always something bad on the horizon — heated conversations with Green Party colleagues; resignation from Parliament; court, where she pleaded guilty to all charges; sentencing; the media interviews she says she felt obliged to give to provide the electorate with some insight into what had occurred. Difficult, but each court appearance or interview at least came with an infusion of adrenaline. When, after her sentencing in June — she was fined $1600 and ordered to pay a further $260 in court costs — and a flurry of media attention, there was suddenly nothing in front of her. She sank into “empty despair”. “It doesn’t just go away once you do the John Campbell interview and go home. It’s like, that’s when the hard work began.”
Ghahraman’s instincts told her to pick herself up and move on, to try to find a new job, a new challenge, look for something in which she could lose herself. Her therapist strongly suggested she do the opposite, that she stay present and not try to move her life forward in any way. Just to stay “in the crisis”.
Friends helped, she says. It took destroying her life to realise “how much the people that you love, that you’ve invested in, for lack of a better word, are just going to hold you. I’m just so grateful.” Dozens and dozens of emails of support came her way, as well as handwritten notes — many from those on the other side of politics. Her therapist encouraged her to leave the house, and she spent hours at the “safe space” of Open, the K Rd cafe run by a close friend. Strangers sometimes approached to offer a kind word, something that was difficult for Ghahraman at first — a circuitous reminder of the nightmare she’d been through — but eventually helpful. “It was necessary in hindsight to know that you are in a society where there’s love and understanding — that was invaluable for me.” She learned to accept the shame she might feel when a glance lingered too long in her direction or she felt herself the subject of a whispered conversation. “You have to live with the shame,” she says. “It’s not going to kill you.”
To pay her mortgage, she’d had to begin working almost immediately after her resignation from Parliament, using her connections in the Auckland legal scene to get freelance work writing legal submissions, while also drawing on the expertise garnered over seven years in Parliament to advise various charitable and not-for-profit groups on the funding available — especially in the straitened economic environment overseen by the current government. That brought her back into contact with those she had worked with before her life hit the front page of the newspapers, and was a reminder of some of the things she’d achieved as a politician.
During a meeting, Abann Yor, chief executive of the Aotearoa Resettled Community Coalition (ARCC), reminded Ghahraman of the importance of the work she had done in doubling the cap on the family reunification scheme to 600 people a year, as well as funding the flights and medical checks those refugees would need before they could join family in Aotearoa. Yor’s own mother was a beneficiary of the scheme, he told Metro in his Mt Roskill office, arriving in New Zealand late last year from South Sudan. Extending the scheme was an achievement, he says, that shouldn’t be forgotten — and something he’d worked towards for years, but eventually needed a parliamentary ally to help to get over the line. “The good things she has done, from my perspective, should not be just taken away because she had a mistake.” He says that in the aftermath, he tried to make sure that Ghahraman understood she had his support. “We can’t reject you. Whatever you have done has happened… Our role as community members is just to encourage her, to empower her.”
For Ghahraman, working with organisations such as the ARCC, as well as the legal work she picked up, began as a piecemeal solution to financial realities. But more and more, she told Metro in January, it was starting to feel like something else. “Maybe this is actually a practice, maybe this is actually what I’m doing. It’s not a limbo. It’s real life and I feel so fortunate. Now I can start to kind of think about one or two kaupapa that I will do substantive voluntary work for as well. And then that’s like a full life, you know.”
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Early in her conversations with Metro, Ghahraman had described how she had recently begun to cry again — a breakthrough, according to her therapist, who said it meant she was no longer trapped in a “trauma response” but had begun to react to the world’s stimuli on a more even psychological keel. When she spoke last with Metro, in early February, as a black neighbourhood cat hunted for lizards in the untidy lawn behind her, her tenant-flatmate’s washing strung across the line, Ghahraman didn’t cry, but she worked herself into anger — expressed in the minute fluttering of her lower jaw — as she discussed the circumstances that had made her the renewed subject of national attention.
On 12 October last year, Ghahraman was shopping for groceries at the Pak’nSave in Royal Oak. It was a regular shop: frozen food, meat, vegetables, most of it placed within two tote bags that sat in her trolley. A security guard approached and told her the CCTV operator had noticed her putting things in her bags, and that she needed to leave. She asked whether she could finish her shop but was told that they just wanted her to go. “I just stepped back and said, ‘Okay, well, you take everything you want to take out of the bags.’”
Maybe, she thought, it was a bit strange to be putting things into her own bags. For a moment, she wondered whether this was “relapsing behaviour? Am I exhibiting weird behaviour?” But she says she knew she hadn’t committed a crime, nor had she intended to. The security guard took everything out and she left with her empty bags, but not before he asked, “Do I know you? Have you been banned from the store before? Because you look really familiar.” Ghahraman walked out of the supermarket and tried to put the incident out of her mind. “It felt shit, like it brought up lots of shame.”
A few days later, her lawyer, Annabel Cresswell, texted. Cresswell was representing Ghahraman in the High Court at Auckland, having filed an appeal for a discharge without conviction for the original offending. During the discharge hearing, police had tried to have the Pak’nSave incident included in the court’s consideration, but it was dismissed as irrelevant by Justice Geoffrey Venning, who heard the appeal. Foodstuffs, Pak’nSave’s parent company, maintains that it did not report the incident to the police. In a statement to Metro, police said “that a report of shoplifting dating back to 12 October 2024 was notified to police through the Auror platform. Retailers are able to report incidents to police, via the platform.” According to the police, two days after Ghahraman was asked to leave the supermarket — that is, on the day of the hearing — the footage was assessed in a “routine screening of shoplift offending”.
Ghahraman was surprised that some “random, vague allegation” would make it into court but — again — put it out of her mind. The appeal against her sentence was denied. That seemed the absolute end of the shoplifting saga — until journalists began calling, seeking to confirm that police were investigating the Pak’nSave incident. Businessman and former mayoral candidate Leo Molloy had started the rumour, having apparently been made aware that an investigation was ongoing. (Molloy did not respond to Metro’s enquiries; a police spokesperson said “there [was] nothing to suggest” police had anything to do with that leak.) Ghahraman’s initial reaction was to feel as if she was being pitched back into the same dark place she had spent the whole year trying to escape, telling herself, “‘I can’t do it again. It was too hard. Why are they doing this?’ Because I knew I wasn’t guilty.”
Within a few days, Ghahraman found herself with a different perspective. The media briefly returned to camp out outside her house, but Ghahraman had already left town for a holiday she’d mentioned to Metro weeks before. In the heat and quiet of a rural Northland retreat, she found herself thinking, “You know what? I’m not in a crisis, and over the past year I’ve found a reserve of strength I didn’t even know I had.” Police eventually announced they wouldn’t be progressing with their investigation, in a strange statement unequivocally stating that shoplifting had occurred. Police later edited that statement to include a judicious “alleged”, after prominent criminal defender Ron Mansfield KC — whom Ghahraman and Cresswell had earlier brought in to consult on her situation, thinking “maybe the cops needed to talk to a man” — interjected on Ghahraman’s behalf. Ghahraman told the New Zealand Herald that it was “weird” that police seemed so “obsessed with this non-issue”, and again, that seemed to be the end of it.
Inevitably, however, another leak — the photo of Ghahraman in Pak’nSave during the incident — found its way on to the internet via the right-wing blog of a used-car salesman, the original leaker eventually revealed to have been a Pak’nSave security guard (now fired). There was another flurry of headlines, in which one got the sense that public sentiment was now firmly behind Ghahraman and against the surveillance systems apparently tracking our every supermarket step. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner is now looking into Ghahraman’s case and whether it reveals broader privacy issues.
When Metro first approached Ghahraman in September last year, she’d wanted to talk about her growing contentment with the more humble dimensions of her new life. Well-wishers would, with good intentions, assure her that the next thing she would do would be “even bigger”, as if the only way to redemption for her crimes lay in eclipsing her previous achievements. Instead, Ghahraman wanted to retreat into as much anonymity as the world would allow her as she focused on her wellbeing. A year later, James Shaw says it is “immediately apparent that she’s in a better place”. “Without being glib about it, most people I know who have left Parliament are in better shape a year after the fact,” he says.
Ghahraman herself stops short of claiming unqualified happiness — “Who’s happy?” she asks — but says the medication for her recently diagnosed ADHD has helped to further quell the worst of her anxiety as her state of mind continues to improve. “I definitely have moments of being okay, like calm and safe, for extended periods of time, you know, in my days. I didn’t have that for a long time.”
Ghahraman’s latest brush with national attention, combined with an improving mental state, has made her rethink the idea — once so pervasive — that she needed to retreat into the margins. If she is given a platform, she thinks now, why not use it? She doesn’t want a return to public life, just to perhaps live her own a little more loudly than she had thought in the middle of last year. “I was private — but if they want to send the media to buzz around my house, then I’ll come out and I will talk about gender-based violence, like we need to.”
