Leaked Wedding Video Tarnishes Hard-Line Iranian Official

NY Times-Oct21st2025

By Farnaz Fassihi

He is one of Iran’s most senior defense and national security officials and a confidant of the supreme leader. Until recently, he oversaw nuclear talks with the United States and has also shepherded the enforcement of strict Islamic rules on women and girls and ordered violent crackdowns on protesters.

Now, however, Rear Adm. Ali Shamkhani is embroiled in a type of scandal seldom seen among the Islamic Republic’s top echelon. He is accused of leading a double life: preaching piety in public but practicing an altogether different lifestyle with his family.

On Saturday, a video of his daughter’s wedding taken last April was leaked, and it quickly went viral online. In the video, Admiral Shamkhani is seen walking his daughter down the aisle into a wedding hall. The bride, Setayesh, is wearing a low-cut, strapless dress that shows her cleavage, and the admiral’s wife is wearing a similarly revealing blue lace evening gown with bare back and sides. Other women in the video are not wearing the hijab.

The video of his daughter’s wedding has touched a nerve among Iran’s political class and the public for many reasons.

It is a display of exuberant wealth when most Iranians are struggling to get by and many young people can’t afford to get married; it shows disregard for conservative Islamic values; and it depicts Western-style wedding traditions, with the father walking the bride down the aisle instead of the Iranian practice of the bride and groom entering together.

On Monday, a reformist-leaning newspaper, Shargh, ran a front-page photograph of Admiral Shamkhani. “Buried Under Scandal,” read the headline. The evening before, political pundits and a group of veterans from Iran’s war with Iraq said in a discussion on the Clubhouse app that he must resign from all official roles and make a public apology.

Amir Hossein Mosalla, a journalist and editor of a political publication in Iran, said on social media that the video showed that “the regime officials themselves have no belief in their own laws that they support, they only want to make people’s lives miserable.”

Admiral Shamkhani is not just any Iranian official. He is currently the representative of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to a newly created National Defense Council. Until July, he spent a decade as the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, a role that gave him formidable power and influence over national and foreign policies. He is also a former defense minister who once commanded both the navy and the Revolutionary Guards naval forces.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/world/middleeast/iran-wedding-video.html