Iranian-American actress Jewell Farshad, who recently appeared in the third season of HBO’s hit series “Euphoria,” has accused Iranian national soccer team player Ramin Rezaeian of sending her unsolicited sexual messages during this summer’s World Cup in the United States, including requests for explicit videos and pressure to meet him with other women.
Farshad, who lives in the U.S., made the allegations in an interview with the Daily Mail and provided the newspaper with a screenshot of what she said was their Instagram correspondence.
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Jewell Farshad, Ramin Rezaeian
(Photo: Instagram/@jewellfarshad, Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)
Farshad said Rezaeian initially contacted her through a direct message on Instagram in late June, while Iran was still competing in the World Cup. She said she did not initially consider the approach unusual. She has nearly 1 million followers, recently appeared in the high-profile HBO drama and said she had grown accustomed to being contacted by other public figures.
According to Farshad, however, what began as a friendly exchange became flirtatious and then increasingly sexual. She alleged that Rezaeian repeatedly requested sexually explicit content and pressured her to join him on a trip where he wanted her to “bring other women.”
Farshad, a Los Angeles-based actress and former Miss California, told the newspaper that Rezaeian invited her to meet him in Paris. She said she later came to believe that other people would be involved, including Sasha Sobhani, an Iranian social media influencer and son of a former senior official in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Farshad described the proposed gathering as feeling like an “Epstein-esque” situation, a reference to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
A screenshot of the Instagram correspondence between Farshad and Rezaeian
(Photo: from Daily Mail)
She said the conversation initially centered on Iran’s national soccer team. Farshad told Rezaeian that she hoped the team would win and he thanked her, with their messages continuing intermittently over hours and sometimes days.
“One day, I received a message from Ramin saying, 'Where do you live? You're so sexy?,'” Farshad told the Daily Mail. She said she initially took the flirting as a compliment because she had believed their conversation was primarily about the national team.
After she told him she lived in Los Angeles, Farshad said Rezaeian asked whether she would meet him in Paris. She tentatively replied, “Maybe.”
Farshad alleged that the exchange then changed abruptly, with Rezaeian asking about her sexual experiences with women and requesting an explicit video of her.
“It just went from zero to 100,” she said, describing her surprise at how quickly the conversation escalated.
Jewell Farshad
(Photo: Instagram/@jewellfarshad)
Farshad said she stopped responding in hopes that Rezaeian would understand that the messages were making her uncomfortable. Instead, she alleged, he continued messaging her into the night, repeatedly asking about her sexual experiences and whether she had participated in orgies.
“I would just keep saying no,” Farshad said. She said she told him she could not send intimate material because she was an actress and model and feared it could be leaked.
Farshad said she initially felt pressured enough that she nearly agreed to meet him but changed her mind after searching his name online and finding what she described as troubling allegations about his past behavior toward women and girls.
After Rezaeian returned to Iran, Farshad said, he began contacting her from a private Instagram account. She alleged that she saw messages being deleted and that Rezaeian repeatedly switched Instagram’s disappearing-message function back on after she turned it off.
“That's when I was like, 'Okay, I don't think it's safe for me to speak to him anymore,’” she said.
Farshad said the nature of the messages led her to conclude that the proposed Paris meeting was not simply an invitation for the two of them to travel together.
She characterized the situation as potentially involving other women and likened it to trafficking, though she provided no evidence in the account beyond her interpretation of the messages to support that characterization.
Farshad also said she later noticed that Rezaeian had been spending time with Sobhani. She said she found photographs showing the two near the same private jet and another image of them together in Saint-Tropez, France.
Farshad also linked her decision to speak publicly about the exchange to her opposition to Iran’s government and what she described as Rezaeian’s support for the Islamic Republic.
“I was born in Iran and lived there until I was 18, so I personally have been traumatized by the regime,” she said. “I've been taken in for showing my hair or taking a photo of a mosque, so I personally experienced that.”
After Farshad posted about her alleged interaction with Rezaeian on Instagram, she said she received abusive and threatening messages.
“A Telegram channel was created where people were saying there was a fatwa against me and that I'm secretly a Mossad agent,” she said, referring to an Islamic religious ruling and Israel’s foreign intelligence agency.
Farshad said some messages encouraged her to kill herself. Meanwhile, she said other women contacted her and alleged that they had received similar messages from Rezaeian, including requests for explicit images. Those accounts have not been independently verified.
"It's the core of what the Islamic Republic is," she says. "They pretend that they're gods and prophets, that they don't have Jeffrey Epsteins, or Diddys, that they are above it all… But then, in private, they do worse things than them.
"They don't understand freedom. So when they see a free woman, they're like, 'Oh, she's okay with the stuff that I see in porn.'
"Why should a woman get killed, like Mahsa Amini, for showing her hair, and then Ramin is protected by the regime to behave however he wants?" she asks. "Because he's their golden boy. He's their player and represents them in media. Why is the standard different for him?"
Rezaeian’s response to Farshad’s allegations was not included in the account provided.