It all happened on a summer night of 2014. Even though it was a warm night in Tehran, Iran, it soon became chilling and sinister for journalists Jason Rezaian and Yeganeh Salehi. July 22ⁿᵈ of 2014 was the night Iranian authorities decided to raid and arrest the couple for no explicit reason. Laptops, notebooks, books were confiscated from their home. “Investigation phase,” as head of Tehran Justice Department, Gholam-Houssein Esmaili, worded, has begun and Iranian security forces “will not permit our country to become a land where our enemies and their agents carry out their activities”.

The arrests were first reported by The Washington Post two days after the nightmare begun for Rezaian and Salehi, but the mystery behind the circumstances of the couple’s arrest and detention remained unsolved. Salehi was released on bail on roughly two months and a half later, but Razaian was far from being completely released from authorities’ custody. Jason Razaian was to be judged in an Iranian court for no declared reasons and not allowed bail, as announced on December 7. Iranian government was unyielding to calls from multiple consulates, including the Swiss and American embassies, to provide Jason with consular services and even the location in which he was held was kept secret.

The cause of such intrusion in Jason’s day to day life as blogger and writer for The Washington Post remained secretive. That’s the reality many journalists face when trying to tell their stories.

Jason Razaian was born and raised in Marin, California, acquiring his dual-citizen status because of his Iranian father, which seemed fitting, since Jason’s aspirations as a professional was to write real stories on the humanness of Iran to american public. This commitment was partly due the fact that Razaian saw the disconnection between what he saw on news reports about Iran being released in the United States and what he actually saw in the streets of Tehran, and partly due this desire of every true journalist to uncover the multi-facet aspect of a story and share it to the world.

In a sense, Jason brought to the American audience what it wasn’t receiving from standard politics and religious news about Iran: empathy. He wrote how Iranian baseball team was completely underfunded and under-appreciated by their nation, and how heartbroken and somewhat hopeful the team players were in just 5 days before his arrest. Those kind of stories showed American readers just how human Iran could be.

Even though he wasn’t quite embraced by Iranians as their own, a situation common among dual-citizens, he believed in their resilience and faith and was optimistic for a better future for his people. He uncovered this mask of the unknown that is often put on Middle Eastern countries and their culture, helping prove that Iranians could feel hope and happiness even as their country was in a political disaster.

This long and tiring ordeal was over in January 16, 2016, when Jason was released after months of uncertainty and eccentric trials, with the help of many supporters internationally and even social media.

On April 27th of 2016, he longingly announced to a few dozen of students at Boston University that he’d “still go back to Iran” but doesn’t even know if that’s a possibility since he and the Iranian Government didn’t part particularly amicably as he was released. During his detention, Jason explained that he’d “try to talk about movies and books and memories, just to laugh and feel”. My guess is that, just like every other human would, Jason craved feelings and humanness while in solitary. It’s a sad irony that he’d crave in an Iranian prison just what he was trying to express in his writings about the Iranian people to the American public: the human aspect of adversity.

Jason story ended with him coming back to the United States unarmed, but there are so many more journalists and photojournalists arrested for null charges all around the world. In this world where many atrocities against human rights are being committed everyday, we still have honest journalists fighting and paying with their freedom and even life to tell us these stories. It’s time that people remember that #JournalismIsNotaCrime and appreciate every story we read as the work of people who put their life in risk to write.