This Goes Out to the Underground

In this searingly honest memoir, an activist and human-trafficking expert retells the true story of how she utilized illicit trade networks to smuggle herself across the globe and save her daughter—and ignited a feminist movement.

Pardis Mahdavi has always been caught between worlds—whether the strict expectations of her Iranian-American family stuck in the 1970s versus the liberated reality of living in Iran during the sexual revolution in the early 2000s; the demands of her traditional, controlling husband and the responsibility that came with her research into the world’s most vulnerable women; or the pipe dream of justice from a legal system that abandoned her in contrast to the efficiency of grassroots organizations that served to traffic goods and people.

When her two-year-old daughter vanished, Pardis believed she had a twenty-four-hour window before Tara might be lost forever. With the police unable to help, Pardis called the one man she still trusted: Sumac, who had been her jailer in Iran four years earlier, when she was put under house arrest and interrogated about her involvement in the movements to challenge the regime.

In a Los Angeles courtroom fighting for custody, Pardis met other women stymied by an unjust justice system. These women, marginalized since birth, used underground feminist networks to do the impossible over and over: to survive and make the world safer for others through lasting changes in human trafficking laws and reproductive rights.