Dana Chivvis
speaker
159 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 14 Sep
Dana Chivvis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
She's openly critical of the Bashar al-Assad regime at a time when the regime was arresting, torturing, and murdering critics and activists. In one post, titled Irony, there's a photo she's taken of a billboard. On it, Assad's smiling face and the head-scratcher of a tagline, Syria believes in you. Below the photo, Amina writes, sure, in all caps and multiple exclamation points. She's provocative.
Legally, I can't let her read you the rest of this poem. FCC rules. So, a young, pretty, Syrian-American lesbian taunting the brutal Assad regime. It's not much surprise when the secret police show up at her house one day. On April 26th, Amina publishes a post titled, My Father the Hero. She describes a harrowing scene.
It was the middle of the night, and these two young, muscly guys in leather jackets rang the doorbell of her family's home. They've come for Amina. They know about her blog, know that she's a lesbian. They threaten to rape her. But Amina's father argues with them, chides them. He knows them, knows their families. He says to them, quote, Do you know what is our family name? You do?
Then you know where we stood when Mohammed, peace be upon him, went to Medina. You know who it was who liberated Al-Quds. You know too, maybe, that my father fought to save this country from the foreigners." He tells them to leave, and they do. Amina's post goes viral. Back in D.C., Liz decides to write about it.
Amina emails her back. And the next day, Liz publishes a post. Serial blogger says she faced arrest but remains defiant. In the article, Amina tells Liz, quote, Six weeks later, Liz goes into the office.
The post says Amina was abducted by three government agents.
Liz was shocked and upset by this news.
Homosexuality was, and still is, illegal in Syria. Liz writes a post about Amina's disappearance. So does The Washington Post's Syria correspondent, and The New York Times, and The Guardian, and others. Liz calls the State Department. They tell her they're looking into it. A Twitter campaign gets going, hashtag Free Amina, and multiple Facebook groups, which get over 10,000 followers overnight.
It's a big deal. And then?
Has anyone actually met Amina in person? Not just on the internet? It's a good question. In fact, when Liz emailed Amina asking for an interview, Amina had responded that for her own safety, she couldn't talk on the phone. So Liz had sent her questions by email. Do you remember the oh fuck moment that you had when you realized people were doubting her identity? Yeah.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the photo of Amina on a gay girl in Damascus was actually a photo of a woman named Jelena Lecic, who is of Croatian descent and was living in London at the time. So Liz and her editor, Melissa Bell, start trying to figure out who Amina actually is. They look up the IP address of the gay girl blog. It leads back to Scotland, to the University of Edinburgh.
And they get a mailing address for Amina from one of her online friends. It's a house in Georgia, the state, not the country, owned by an American couple who are studying in Scotland. They narrow in on the wife, a woman named Britta.
Syria believes in you. It's the same photo from Amina's blog post titled Irony.
That's a smoking gun. Like, you never get that clear of an answer. Totally. Totally. Yeah. So they got to call Britta, but they can't find Britta's phone number. But they do find Britta's mom's phone number. They call her up.
One of those husbands. What they learned about Tom. He's 40 years old, a Middle East fanatic, obsessed with the Israeli-Palestine conflict. He's getting his master's degree at the University of Edinburgh. There's more.
Okay, one last important detail about Tom's extracurricular activities.
She's not just writing lesbian erotica. She's on dating sites. She's had an online girlfriend in Canada for the last six months. The girlfriend started one of the Facebook campaigns to free Amina.
LesGetReal.com, for those of you who don't remember the sapphic offerings of the internet in the year 2011, was a website where a variety of writers blogged about lesbianism and the lesbian news of the day. Amina had written a bunch on LesGetReal.com, and the founder, Paula Brooks, had encouraged her to start a gay girl in Damascus that winter. And, Paula told Liz, they'd had a little online fling.
And this is over email or they're like?
Liz explained to Paula what was going on with Amina.
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