Just a few wisps of Masih Alinejad’s hair were visible as she walked in Iran with her brother one day over a decade ago. That was enough for the morality police.
“They beat up my brother in front of me,” Ms. Alinejad, an Iranian-born dissident, testified in Manhattan this week.
For over a week, jurors in Federal District Court have heard witnesses in the murder-for-hire trial of two members of the Russian mob, Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, who stand accused of trying to kill Ms. Alinejad on behalf of influential figures in Iran.
The plot unraveled in 2022, when a man named Khalid Mehdiyev was arrested near Ms. Alinejad’s Brooklyn home with an assault rifle after going onto her porch and trying to open the door.
An indictment said that men led by a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave Mr. Amirov the assignment to murder Ms. Alinejad. Prosecutors said he then contacted Mr. Omarov, who gave the job to Mr. Mehdiyev.
Testimony in the trial has come from F.B.I. agents; an expert on Russian mobsters who call themselves Thieves-in-Law; and Mr. Mehdiyev, a member of that group who is cooperating with the government and implicated his fellow mobsters.
Those witnesses aimed to describe how conspirators tried to assassinate Ms. Alinejad, and her testimony on Tuesday was meant to show why.
Wearing a white scarf around her neck and a white flower in her hair, Ms. Alinejad occasionally consulted a Farsi translator, at one point saying as an aside, “God, I’m nervous.” Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov gazed ahead impassively at the defense table.
She barely discussed the 2022 plot, saying only that she had seen a man walk past her house that summer then found him moments later in her garden “staring into my eyes.”
“I got really panicked,” she testified, adding that the F.B.I. soon brought her to a “safe house.”
During about two hours of testimony, Ms. Alinejad concentrated on the years before that moment, recalling how she rankled Iranian authorities for decades, beginning as a girl in a village south of the Caspian Sea.
She was arrested as a teenager by security services and interrogated about a clandestine group advocating freedom that she had helped form. Ms. Alinejad said the group had read “forbidden books, underground books” and distributed pamphlets. She was held about a month, she said, then released with a suspended sentence of “74 lashes and four years in prison.”
A few years later she was a journalist reporting on the Iranian parliament, Ms. Alinejad said. She gained a reputation for sharp questions and combative exchanges that made her something of a public figure: a young woman who challenged powerful men.
At one point, Ms. Alinejad testified, a cleric threatened to punch her. Just as the morality police had, he had taken issue with hair that had escaped from her head scarf. Iranian law compelled her to wear it, but she saw the cloth as a symbol of repression.
After leaving Iran, Ms. Alinejad continued her journalism in the United States, producing a documentary for Radio Farda, a Persian broadcaster at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, about protesters killed by security forces after the disputed re-election in 2009 of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
She then turned to activism, starting a Facebook page protesting the hijab law and publishing videos on her Instagram account in which Iranian women said they had been harassed or beaten by the morality police or by Revolutionary Guards.
By 2018, Ms. Alinejad’s campaign appeared to be spreading, as women doffed scarves and waved them on sticks, like flags. Ms. Alinejad testified that the authorities cracked down, arresting large numbers of women.
The government’s action didn’t work, she said in court. “That’s why they created a law under my name.”
Jurors watched a video in which the head judge of Iran’s Revolutionary Court announced that anyone who made a recording “pertaining to the removal of hijab” could spend 10 years in prison. The same penalty, he said, applied to anyone who sent Ms. Alinejad a recording “about anything that is against the regime.”
Around that time, according to court papers, officials in Iran offered money to Ms. Alinejad’s family, asking them to lure her to Turkey, apparently so she could be abducted and imprisoned.
That effort failed, but Ms. Alinejad’s brother was sent to prison for two years, accused of directing or encouraging her actions, she testified.
In 2021, a network of men in Iran led by an intelligence official were indicted in Manhattan on charges of conspiring to kidnap Ms. Alinejad and take her to Iran. The plot Mr. Amirov and Mr. Omarov are accused of took place soon after. And U.S. officials say that figures linked to the Iranian government have not given up.
Last year, the Justice Department announced that Farhad Shakeri, an Iranian with connections to the Revolutionary Guard, had directed two men from New York City in a new murder-for-hire plot targeting Ms. Alinejad.
“You just got to have patience,” Mr. Shakeri told his accomplices, according to Justice Department officials. “You got to wait.”