mobanmarketTehran: Iranian state television has aired an interview with an Instagrammer famous for drastically altering her appearance through plastic surgery to look like a zombie and arrested for alleged “blasphemy”.
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The social media celebrity known as Sahar Tabar was arrested on the orders of Tehran’s Islamic guidance court on October 5 after “numerous requests from the public” for her to be detained, the broadcaster said.
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She faces charges including blasphemy, inciting violence, gaining income through inappropriate means and encouraging corruption among the young.
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“I do not look like these photoshopped pictures right now,” the 22-year-old told state television in the interview aired on Tuesday, her face blurred out.
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“This is close to what I look like these days,” Tabar said, holding a phone with a portrait of herself.
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She resembles Hollywood star Angelina Jolie in the picture, but her face is gaunt, her nose sharply turned up and cheeks sunken.
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“Corpse Bride influence”
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Tabar denied reports she sought to look like Jolie, saying instead that she was inspired by a zombie-like character from the animated fantasy film “Corpse Bride”.
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Her Instagram account, which she said had 486,000 followers, no longer appears to be active.
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The television channel noted that she was the only child of a divorced couple who had been living with her mother, and that she “could have been in university by now” if not because of her “strange” online persona and fame.
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Doing it for the ‘gram
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“I saw people were following what I did and, when the likes grew, I felt I was doing the right thing,” said Tabar, admitting she had not finished high school.
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Voicing regret, Tabar said her mother had tried to stop her from changing her appearance, but the fame and Instagram likes made her go on.
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“My childhood dream was to be famous.”
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The broadcaster said Tabar admitted that “vulgarity on social media gets a lot of clicks” and if she had not followed this path, she could have been “in a better place right now”.
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Amnesty International has repeatedly called on Iran to stop broadcasting videos of “confessions” by suspects, saying they “violate the defendants’ rights”.
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