[Source: AP]

Ninety-nine lashes and a prison sentence awaited Zar Amir Ebrahimi in 2008 when she decided to flee Iran.

Ebrahimi’s only crime was sex. A videotape made privately with her then-partner had two years earlier been leaked by someone else, and spread widely.

Ebrahimi, then a well-known TV star in Iran, was charged with having sexual relations outside wedlock. She was ostracized and harassed, her friends and coworkers interrogated.

“I lost my career. I lost my whole life. And at some point, I became traumatized. I was scared to go to the street alone,” Ebrahimi said in a recent interview. “The authorities did everything to me to just make me more helpless and make me more scared. I think at some point, they wanted me to get to suicide, just somehow remove myself from that society.”

Ebrahimi, now 41, decided she wouldn’t take any more punishment. She fled to Paris, slowly remaking her life and adjusting to a foreign culture. She started with babysitting and restaurant jobs. She hasn’t returned to Iran since.

“I can never see myself getting these lashes,” Ebrahimi says.

Now, 16 years later, Ebrahimi has dramatically resurfaced on the global stage. She stars in Ali Abbasi’s “Holy Spider,” playing a journalist investigating a serial killer who is murdering women and sex workers in the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad. At the Cannes Film Festival, Ebrahimi won best actress for her performance.