There was something unexpectedly, almost uncomfortably intimate about the pleading tone of the messages in my Twitter feed. “One thing, don’t use that idiotic line ‘dictators daughter’!” And then: “‘I have a name which simple as yours, Natalia!”

The author indeed has a name: Gulnara Karimova. A woman who over the years has been many things: Uzbekistan’s Ambassador to Spain and permanent representative to the United Nations, an entrepreneur, a philanthropist, a Harvard student, a patron to Uzbekistan’s fledgling fashion industry, a jewelry designer, a pop star, and, most recently, the country’s best known twitterer. Gerard Depardieu has just agreed to star in a film based on a screenplay she wrote. None of these carefully constructed roles can compete with the one that Gulnara Karimova is evidently uncomfortable with: the daughter and rumored successor of Islam Karimov, who is, indeed, Uzbekistan’s dictator.

In Uzbekistan, Gulnara, who is forty, is feared no less than her father, who has run the Central Asian nation since it was a Soviet Republic and he was Party Secretary. But unlike her father, whose public appearances are rare and carefully orchestrated, Gulnara finds it difficult to keep out of the public eye, whether it’s with a new music video in which GooGosha (her stage name) hops from the rooftops of the ancient city of Samarkand, an appearance in a long leopard-skin dress, or a press conference in Tashkent where she announces that she is “grateful to God that he gave me my height, my face, my features.”

For journalists like me, Gulnara’s love of extravaganzas offers a way to approach an impenetrable country. She is a hook on which we like to hang more serious issues like torture, forced labor, and Uzbekistan’s profound isolation. Unlike her father, Gulnara is easy to write, and often laugh about—unless, that is, you are from Uzbekistan.

Two years ago, a bankrupt Uzbek businessman living in Kazakhstan, whom I’ll call Alisher, described to me his rushed departure from the country. His troubles started the day Gulnara visited his newly opened restaurant in Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital. To his horror, Gulnara liked it. Later that day, three men in leather jackets came to the restaurant to inform Alisher that the restaurant no longer belonged to him. Within days, Alisher lost his businesses, received multiple threats against his family, and had visitors from the tax and criminal police. A week later, when he escaped across the Uzbek-Kazakh border, his black hair had turned white.

In cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010, American diplomats described Gulnara as a “robber baron” and Uzbekistan’s “most hated” public figure who has made millions by stealing Uzbek businesses and demanding bribes from foreign investors. Recently, Swedish television broadcast an investigation into a 2007 transaction in which Gulnara allegedly hired a henchman to negotiate a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar bribe from the Stockholm-based communications company TeliaSonera. (She hasn’t commented; the company denied engaging in bribery.)

Gulnara seems to be everywhere but speaking to her is a virtual impossibility. The last time I tried to get an interview was in 2008, when I was the BBC’s Central Asia correspondent. I was put in touch with a “middle man” in Moscow. He promised a thirty-minute interview in exchange for pre-agreed questions and a twenty-thousand-dollar cash advance. I never rang him back. But imagine my surprise when on a recent evening Twitter suddenly offered me an opportunity to interact with Uzbekistan’s first daughter for free.

I can’t claim credit for starting the conversation. It was Andrew Stroehlein, the communications director for the International Crisis Group, whose Twitter message Gulnara first replied to. As I watched Andrew’s attempts to challenge Gulnara about torture in her father’s prisons, I half jokingly tried my luck with a simpler request:

@GulnaraKarimova since you are so approachable on twitter, can you please let me back into uzbekistan?i was deported without an explanation

I never expected a reply. It came within minutes: “if you give me details,but clear ones,It’ll be nice to answer to your quest.”

For the next two hours we exchanged more messages. Gulnara complained about the lack of understanding for her country and why she was being questioned for things that aren’t in her direct control. She was also answering Stroehlein’s tweets. After he asked her to condemn torture in Uzbek prisons, she wrote: “one time: MAY I HAVE a FIRM PRECISE CASSES to look at to get equinted with it and to talk to you than..e-mail: dadu5@yandex.ru.”

Andrew and I compared notes as we read and retweeted her messages in disbelief, half expecting an announcement that Gulnara‘s official account had been hacked by someone who clearly did not have a Harvard alum’s command of English. But when the announcement never came, while oddly phrased tweets kept coming, we thought that the author was genuine: no assistant, we assumed, would dare undermine Gulnara by making so many grammatical mistakes.

Gulnara seemed a lot more comfortable once we switched to writing in Russian. “I am looking forward to talking on email, Natalia)))))” said one of her last messages.

I e-mailed her the details of my recent visit to Tashkent for the BBC, during which I was denied entry at the airport. I explained that I had reported from Uzbekistan before, had never broken any written laws, and did not need a visa to get into the country. And yet, twenty-four hours after my arrival, two grumpy middle-aged men, dressed in civilian clothes but armed with pistols, accompanied me on a flight out of the country. I never succeeded in getting a single word out of them, and it was only after they handed me over to authorities in Kazakhstan that I was given a piece of paper explaining my deportation. It read in Russian: “Natalia Antelava was denied entry to the Republic of Uzbekistan for reasons of being banned from entering Uzbekistan.”

“Perhaps you could you shed more light on it,” I asked Gulnara in my e-mail. I also told her that the reason I went to Tashkent was to research a story about a pervasive government policy of forced female sterilization.

Women’s health is one of Gulnara’s charitable causes, and I wondered if she might be interested to hear that after my failed attempt to enter Uzbekistan, I spent two weeks on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where I interviewed fourteen women who had had their uteruses removed or fallopian tubes tied in Uzbekistan without their knowledge. I also spoke to doctors from state hospitals who said that they were given quotas on how many women should be sterilized every month. They believe that forced sterilization is the government’s way of controlling Uzbekistan’s rapidly growing rural population.

Uzbek officials, who have in the past denied existence of the practice, ignored my requests for comment. A year on since the trip, I was suddenly looking forward to asking Gulnara what she thought of her father’s reproductive-health practices.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like I will get answers. Gulnara hasn’t replied to my e-mails, although she did recently defend herself in another Twitter conversation with the I.C.G.’s Andrew Stroehlein—but Stroehlein says that he is still waiting for her to answer the letter, in which he listed dozens of documented cases of torture and asked about Uzbekistan’s refusal to allow U.N. special representatives to enter the country, which is an issue that falls under Gulnara’s jurisdiction as U.N. Ambassador. Gulya, as she often refers to herself, is still out there tweeting, mostly pictures of herself at different functions. I still nag her once in a while. But these days it’s a one-way relationship, and she clearly prefers to interact with her supporters. She recently retweeted one of them: “you do so much for the revival of the Uzbek culture. It fills us with courage and desire to develop.”

Natalia Antelava is a BBC journalist based in New Delhi. Her investigation into forced sterilizations in Uzbekistan for BBC’s Radio 4 and World Service recently won one of Britain’s top Foreign Press Association awards for the best radio program of 2012.

Photograph by Yves Forestier/Getty.