CAIRO - “I know where you live. Lock your doors, because very soon you are going to find me standing on top of you, raping you, and slitting your throat,” says one of the many anonymous threats to Sabah Khodir, a 29-year-old Egyptian writer and women’s rights activist. 

 Sabah, who currently lives in the US, has been a leading voice in Egypt’s feminist movement, especially since mid-2020, when college student Ahmed Bassam Zaki was outed as a sexual predator. Her cyberactivism has directly contributed to Zaki’s detention and later conviction to 11 years in prison, and helped bring to light a number of other cases of sexual assault. 

 The most notorious was a high-profile gang-rape case that took place at Cairo’s Fairmont hotel in 2014, where a young woman was drugged, raped, and filmed by a powerful group of upper-class men. 24-year-old Nazli Karim, the case’s whistleblower and key witness, and the victim contacted Sabah following Zaki’s detention asking for her support as an activist. 

 She has ever since spoken loudly against the accused rapists and was one of the few voices advocating for Nazli’s freedom after she and other witnesses were detained last August with no clear charges. In November 2020, two months before Nazli left prison, Sabah spoke to the Insider and revealed that she was already receiving threats from people who defend the accused rapists, as well as from other feminist activists who refused to campaign for their release.

 The accused rapists are Ahmed Toulan, Omar Hafez, Khaled Mahmoud, Amr Hussein, Amr El Saddawy, and Amr Faris El Komy – Nazli's ex-husband. El Saddawy and El Komy have fled the country and are still hiding abroad. Mahmoud was released on an EGP 50,000 bail March 15. 

 Since Nazli came out of prison, threats against Sabah have intensified, becoming even more frequent after Mahmoud’s bail. Many of those threats come on Clubhouse, a new audio-based social media app.

 On Clubhouse, users can create “rooms” where they will discuss a chosen topic on a podcast style. What initially seemed like an interesting platform to expose and debate important topics, soon became a hostile environment for Sabah. 

 “Clubhouse is still a very new app and their security and guidelines, and the way they are handling the safety of their users, is really not good. There are always rooms that are created to defame and threaten or extort women. Since day one on Clubhouse, I have been jumping from room to room where people are pinging me to help a girl where her picture or number is being posted. Rooms are created to abuse women, and lots of them are in Arabic,” she told the Insider. 

 Sabah’s active presence on the app, whether promoting her own discussions or fighting users who intimidate and harass women, has made her vulnerable to threats within the platform. Fake accounts often create offensive rooms with her name or go into her rooms to threaten her. 

 "I received death threats of someone saying that they are going to throw acid on my face. Some said that they are going to rape me, butcher me, and then rape my dead body. I will be in a room and out of nowhere people will raise their hand on the speakers and I will bring up a speaker, and he will say with this very scary voice, ‘Sabah, I’m the man who’s been sending you threats and I just want you to know that very soon I’m going to kill you.’ People in the room will start to freak out wondering who that person is, and this person will leave the room, and it will feel like we were just in the same actual setting with each other, like we were actually in front of each other,” she recalls. 

 Sabah is also told that she will never be able to go back to Egypt or else she will be arrested and tortured. “This is heartbreaking because, as an activist, my job is to help make people feel safe, and the worst part is that in that regard I’m so unsafe."

 Asked if there is an arrest warrant waiting for her in Egypt, she said she doesn’t know. “I received a message from this girl saying that she doesn’t know me, but that she knows one of the Fairmont accused rapists, and that he said that he was on the dark web looking for people to kill me and that I could never come to Egypt because there is an order against me to be detained once I come in from the airport.”

 Despite this, Sabah still refuses to believe that Egypt would want her in jail. “I can’t understand why Egypt would want to detain me if everyone I’ve outed so far has been a verified rapist. I’m helping progress the country. If we solve these issues, tourism will go up and the economy will go up because markets for women will be better, and as long as there is safety in Egypt, people will no longer feel the need to flee the country when they have proper education, but will stay to build families. So, it’s very confusing to me why there would be any truth to that, but it makes me scared to even try, because even if I don’t have an arrest warrant out for me, what’s to say that I don’t come to Egypt and randomly disappear as many people have? There’s this constant fear," she says. 

 The fear has awoken a great challenge in Sabah’s life: anxiety. In June 2020, she wrote a post on Facebook to celebrate the fact that she hadn’t had a panic attack for over a year, something she had struggled with since she was a child.  

 “I could not watch a scary movie without reacting to it really badly... I would start to very much convince myself that the demon or the bad guy in the movie is just waiting to kill me in the bathroom,” she said in a live transmission still available on her Instagram account. Sabah disclosed that her panic attacks had become worse by the age of 25. “The panic attacks had gotten so severe that my body actually was completely exhausted... The panic attacks would not stop. We are talking over and over and over again in one day. I was not able to eat at all,” she said. 

 A few weeks later, she shared her own experience with sexual assault. In 2019, she was assaulted in her house in Cairo by someone she considered a friend. “This person used a lot of different techniques to try to get what they wanted,” she said on another Instagram live. The trauma caused by the attack led her to move to the US just a couple of months later.

 “It’s not easy for me to talk about all the death and rape threats that I’m getting because I’m a person who’s been sexually assaulted, so I can’t even explain what that feels like. To a sexual victim, when someone says they want to do something to you, you believe them so much and you feel like they have already done it,” Sabah told the Insider.

 For Jackeline Bastos, an expert in Psychology and Behaviour Analysis, the threats that Sabah has been receiving have an even more devastating effect given her history of sexual assault and anxiety.

 “The main consequence of sexual abuse is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is a disorder described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by the American Psychiatric Association. It involves reliving the situation, fear of it happening again, insomnia, generalized anxiety, fear of anything that is minimally similar to the traumatic situation. As she is exposed to threats of abuse, it is completely understandable that she relives it and feels as if it has already happened, because in fact it has already happened in her life, not exactly by these people, but it has already happened in her history,” Bastos told us. 

 Coercion and any type of control by the aversive – a negative stimulus applied to induce changes in behaviour – such as threats of violence, can alone cause emotional responses in an organism. In Sabah’s case, threats of sexual violation can trigger all the emotional responses related to the traumatic event that she experienced. “The fact that she has already been through a situation like this is an aggravating factor,” says Bastos. 

 As described by behavioural scientist Murray Sidman in his book ‘Coercion and its fall out’, organisms tend to adapt to hostile environments by creating mechanisms to avoid the aversive stimulus. A common reaction to a punishing environment is inaction, where the person subjected to the stimulus tries to do as little as possible to avoid being punished. 

 The people threatening Sabah are trying to generate this inaction response, leading her to stop her activism by threatening to punish her with torture, rape, and death. However, Sabah says she is not going to stop fighting for women’s rights, and will not rest until the people threatening her face legal consequences for their actions. 

 “I have notified authorities in the US and I have notified authorities abroad. They said that they are doing investigations, but I want to be protected and I feel that I deserve to be protected by my country. I, as an activist, even if I’m in the US now, deserve as an Egyptian citizen to be informed that I’m safe. All of the threats are coming to me in Arabic. They don’t come to me speaking in English. These are people speaking to me in my own language from my own country, telling me that they are going to hurt me, harm me, kill me, rape me, rape me after they kill me,” she says. 

 For her, the fact that she complies with the Egyptian law even while in the US is another reason why she deserves to have those threats taken seriously by the Egyptian authorities. “I have taken every legal precaution to make sure I don’t break any Egyptian law even though I’m in the US. I’m in the US and so much of what I can do wouldn’t be considered illegal here considering that it’s based on my jurisdiction, but I still do not do it, because I’m following Egyptian laws. I’m respecting the law, so I must be respected back. If I’m taking care of what the law tells me in Egypt, then it’s my right to demand that I’m safe,” she defends.

 “At the end of the day, a person who threatens me is stupid, because I’m never going to let it go. I will continue to find ways to track down these people until we are able to get them. I had so much stolen from me in such a small amount of time, and I just want to make sure that anybody who is after me this way is immediately detained, because this is a dangerous person,” she continues.

 Sabah told us that she has already been able to identify some of the people threatening her. Asked if she plans to out these people, she said, “I have already sent information on a lot of them to authorities and I'm waiting to find out what the response to that is, but I do plan 100% to out anybody who threatens me.” 

 On her social media accounts, Sabah informed her followers that she will not be taking any new cases for a while in order to prioritize her mental health. The cases she refers to are mostly cases where she navigates victims of sexual assault to lawyers and people who can listen and support them.  

 “For now, I’m trying to take some time away, focus on myself and on my mental health. I’m mentally unwell. I feel like this is a war I have been fighting mostly on my own. There are so many women who depend on me and so many of them only find me credible. I need support,” she says. 

 Despite that, Sabah is still active on social media, where she continues to discuss the feminist agenda and speaks up against the people who are currently threatening her.

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