A week later, Javad called and told me how things had gone. He had telephoned Mehri — he said her name, I did not — and she had agreed to go with him to see the cleric. As promised, the cleric had issued a backdated marriage certificate that showed them, at the date of filming, to have been “sigheh,” or temporarily married. Under sigheh, the duration of the marriage is determined in advance; it could be as short as an hour or as long as a decade. If a child is born, he or she is a rightful child, with all legal entitlements from both parents. When the sigheh expires, the couple should separate, unless the arrangement is mutually extended. The practice has existed for centuries but is shunned by younger and less traditional Iranians, who see it as an archaic religious loophole that effectively legalizes prostitution.

Javad had taken the certificate back to the court at Evin and paid a small fine. The punishment they had dangled over him, execution by stoning, the punishment they had used to force him to denounce me before the cameras, was null. But he had been required to turn over his passport and was barred from leaving the country.

In the days that followed, we talked several times. But I felt as though I was speaking to a stranger. Javad was broken, pleading during each conversation for me not to leave him. He sounded so unwell that regardless of my own feelings, I was worried for him. His denunciation of me had not yet been released, and the threat of it hung over our heads. He kept saying he wanted to see me and the girls, but it was impossible.

I tried to keep it from our daughters, but Nargess finally confronted me. She had overheard something I’d said on the phone; she wanted to know what was happening.

After I told her, she just kept demanding: “Why would he do such a thing and speak against you? Why would he go with that woman?”

I decided to be frank. Nargess worked in The Hague, researching and documenting terrible atrocities. She needed to see how that work connected to what she was experiencing in her family. The field of human rights is not about pretty words; it involves the abuse of the vulnerable by those who wield power. That was the line that connected massacres in Sarajevo to atrocities in Sierra Leone to the systematic persecution of dissidents in places like Iran and Russia.