Italian journalist detained in Iran says she expected to be held longer and praises Musk’s role

ROME — An Italian journalist detained in Iran whose fate became intertwined with that of an Iranian engineer wanted by the United States said she assumed she would have been held much longer, and said her boyfriend’s contact with Elon Musk might have been “fundamental” to her release.

In her first televised interview since her Jan. 8 release, Cecilia Sala referred to the three-nation negotiation that resulted in her freedom after 21 days in detention.

Sala, 29, was arrested in Tehran just days after Italy detained an Iranian national, Mohammad Abedini, on a U.S. warrant and their fates became intertwined. After three weeks of negotiations that Premier Giorgia Meloni called “diplomatic triangulation,” Sala went home and Abedini returned to Iran.

Sala, a journalist with the Chora Media podcast platform and Il Foglio daily, said her boyfriend Daniele Ranieri had contacted Musk’s Italy representative, Andrea Stroppa, after noting a report that Musk had met with Iran’s U.N. ambassador, suggesting he had contacts with Tehran. The United States and Iran don’t have diplomatic relations.

“You understand that it’s a case that concerns Iran, Italy, and the United States, so Elon Musk becomes a fundamental person,” Sala said on the Sunday talk show “Che Tempo Che Fa” (What the Weather’s Like”). “The only response Daniele got from Andrea Stroppa was ‘he is informed.’”

After Sala was released, Musk tweeted that he played a “small role” in her liberation. But referring to a New York Times story about his role, Musk said he “did not have any interaction with Iran. Just recommended support from the US side.”

While the negotiations were underway, Meloni flew to Mar-a-Lago and met with Trump. Stroppa has since tweeted a photoshopped image of Musk eating a plate of pasta, a reference to a reported promise by Sala’s mother to cook Musk his favorite pasta the next time he is in Italy, to thank him for his intervention.

Sala, deprived of news from the outside world, assumed she would have been held for much longer, given other Western prisoners have been held for over a year or more. She said she also feared Trump’s arrival in the White House could have meant a much longer detention, because of regional tensions between Israel and Iran.

“If Donald Trump had come out in the press saying publicly that he wanted particular retaliation against some Iranians, my situation could have been very complicated,” she said. “I was sure that I would be inside a lot more, because everybody else has been inside a lot more.”

Kept in solitary confinement without her glasses or contact lenses that she needs to see, Sala said she was interrogated while hooded, for up to 10 hours a day, by someone speaking “perfect English” and who knew a lot about Italy. She was denied an English-language Quran that she requested and said she felt reality slipping away.

“There were these neon lights on for 24 hours a day. You lose faith in your head when you don’t talk for days. You don’t trust your memory and even responding to your interrogators becomes a pretty heavy psychological game,” she said.

Now free, she said she has moments of euphoria tinged with bouts of anxiety “that I’ll learn how to manage.”