David Bell

I mean, we had a discussion, like, you know, when we legalized weed, it became this thing of, like, maybe we should let the people in jail for that out.

Like, it's similar, but except if you say that, you'll be executed.

Right, yeah.

You shouldn't say that.

So, uh...

Yeah, Luayn al-Hathloul had gained notoriety in 2014 when she was arrested for trying to drive her car from the UAE into Saudi Arabia.

She was released after more than 70 days in prison the month after Salman was made king.

This was initially seen as a reason for optimism towards the new king and his son.

Al-Hathloul had continued to speak out against the kingdom's laws and participated in a major foreign documentary that criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record.

She'd been living overseas with her husband when she returned home in 2017 and was arrested as part of MBS's whiter crackdown on dissent.

She was released and expanded the scope of her activism, pushing against the kingdom's guardianship laws, which made women basically legal minors in perpetuity.

She was invited to speak at the UN, where she directly called kingdom representatives out for denying the existence of guardianship laws.

This was the straw that broke the camel's back.

A month after this, she was kidnapped from her home in Abu Dhabi and flown to Saudi Arabia.

She was released after a month, but forbidden from leaving the country.

Then, just before the driving ban was repealed, she was swept up in a mass arrest with other prominent women's rights activists.

And this is like part of this big sweep that I had talked about just a second ago, right?

Punishments for these activists and their supporters ran the gamut from jail time to travel bans to torture.

The kingdom's captive news media embarked on a campaign of slandering the reputations of those incarcerated.

And some prisoners, including Al-Hathlul, were tortured by officers of the Rapid Intervention Group.