A former University of Arkansas professor accused of pro-Iran sympathies has threatened to retaliate against the anti-regime activist who helped expose her, prompting FBI scrutiny, The Post has learned.
Shirin Saiedi, whose academic career in the US has unraveled, has blamed Lawdan Bazargan for her downfall. Bazargan’s group, the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists (AAIRIA), played a role in publicizing allegations of plagiarism in Saiedi’s scholarly work, as well as claims that she supported the Iranian regime.
“Lawdan Bazargan, you are absolutely finished,” Saeidi wrote last month in a Persian-language post on X that The Post verified as accurate. “I am coming after you with an army… Lawdan, we will do something to you that will be recorded in history.”
Saiedi also allegedly threatened to locate the grave of Bazargan’s brother in Iran and “dance” on it. Bijan Bazargan was executed by the Islamic Republic during the 1988 massacre of political prisoners.
In 2025, Saiedi submitted a letter written on University of Arkansas stationery in support of Hamid Nouri, a former Iranian prison official convicted in Sweden over his role in the 1988 massacre.
AAIRIA has also pressed Cambridge University to examine Saiedi’s PhD thesis, which she completed while studying at the UK institution. The group’s activists allege she fabricated interviews with female victims of the Iranian regime and committed other ethical violations.
“Saeidi has talked about ‘coming after’ me with an ‘army’, ‘erasing’ us and doing something to me that will ‘go down in history.’ Since she began targeting me publicly, I have also received threatening messages from strangers…I feel genuinely unsafe,” Bazargan said of the threats.
In an Aug. 28 letter to the FBI, Bazargan said she feared the regime could use “third-party criminals or organized-crime networks” to target dissidents.
In a recent social media post, Saeidi admitted Cambridge University was investigating her work, calling the probe a “smear and hate campaign.”
“We are currently in the process of filing a complaint about that,” she said in a video posted to Instagram on August 14. “The pressure on the University of Cambridge has resulted in them opening an investigation into my PhD, even though I submitted plenty of documentation a year ago that the accusations were fraudulent.”
In the video, she compared herself to British professor Jason Arday, who also held a position at Cambridge and took his own life after the school began investigating allegations he plagiarized his PhD thesis.
Saiedi did not return a request for comment this week. A GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $15,000 for her.
