Then I made a big mistake. I was still fighting in the system to get a driver’s license. The government kept saying that I needed a mahram or my guardian to prove my identity, but my brother had moved to Kuwait and my father lived on the other side of the country. I brought two male colleagues from work to vouch for me, as well as my phone, which I used to record the audio of the conversation in the Notary Public Service office. Saudi code prohibits recording government officials. But that was not my error. My error was that I posted the entire absurd audio conversation on YouTube and used my Aramco laptop to do it. (When I was released from jail, the first night I was home, I opened a Twitter account under my own name. Almost overnight, I had ten thousand followers; soon it was more than ninety thousand. But I had done that on my personal computer.)
One of the Women2Drive members reposted my audio on the movement’s official YouTube channel under the heading “Manal al-Sharif records violations against Saudi women.” As soon as our opponents found out that the recording was mine, the audio went viral, springing up like a mushroom on site after site and screen after screen. I took it down soon afterward, but it didn’t entirely go away. Aramco was furious. The company came for my computer. They read every one of my emails; they went through everything. I was hauled off to be interrogated by an American man—I presume he was an ex-CIA agent, judging by his behavior. He hollered at me, asking me who outside the company had assisted me and where else I had sent the video. Finally, I was brought in to meet with the public prosecutor. He informed me that someone had filed an official complaint and they were preparing to file a court case against me; if it went forward, I could face two years in jail. My only recourse was to go to the prince and apologize. Aramco management scolded me, and the personnel department gave me a final, written warning and told me if I ever stepped even slightly over the line, I would be dismissed.
“Stay quiet,” they added. “This one passed. The next one won’t.”
Not long after that, Time magazine named me one of its 100 most influential people of the year. The honor included an invitation to a gala dinner in New York City. I had never been to anything like it before. Everyone in the room was famous. I sat next to actress Mia Farrow, though I had no idea who she was because I had never seen her movies. Famous musicians wanted to have their pictures taken with me, but I had never heard their music. I met Hillary Clinton and had my photo taken with her; she told her assistant to get my contact information and “stay in touch.” People were comparing me to Rosa Parks. The evening was incredible. Then I returned home.
After the YouTube incident and the Time magazine honor, Aramco moved me from information security and dropped my name from the specialist development program. I was placed in the procurement department. My job was essentially remedial data entry. But even that would not last long.
The Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering of human rights activists from around the world, invited me to speak in Norway and to receive the first ever Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent—I didn’t know what the word dissent meant when I was awarded the prize. I had to look it up. I was named as a laureate, along with Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel Prize winner, and Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. I asked Aramco for four days off to travel to Oslo. My manager approved it, but the upper-level Aramco executives did not. Their response was swift and sure. “You are not allowed to go,” I was told. “We don’t want Aramco to be associated with you.” The choice was clear: if I said yes to Oslo, I would lose my job. I said yes and resigned, which meant not only leaving my work but giving up my home in the compound by the end of May. And it meant that I was unemployed for the first time since I had graduated from college. But I felt that I had to speak out. I packed up what little was left at my desk and flew to Oslo.
Appearing at the Freedom Forum involved giving a speech. I was very nervous, but as I spoke, I grew calmer. The speech received two standing ovations, something that had not happened for years. The YouTube video of my speech was watched by 250,000 people in a matter of days.
My time at the Oslo Freedom Forum was a reminder of how sheltered I had been. I knew nothing about many of the struggles in other parts of the world. The award I received was a replica of the Lady Liberty statue built by Chinese students during their Tiananmen Square protests. Except I had never heard of Tiananmen Square. All my life, I had only read about events in the Muslim world, about Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and especially the Palestinian conflict with Israel. There was so much more I needed to learn, so many more amazing people to discover.
My seventeen-minute speech in English had gone viral on YouTube, but inside Saudi Arabia, it was mistranslated, with misleading subtitles and commentary that depicted me as an enemy of Saudi Arabia and a traitor to Islam. Almost immediately, I began receiving death threats. People even went to my father’s home in Jeddah and threatened him. A Saudi sheikh condemned me in a fatwa.
Then a television news segment aired during Saudi prime time, after Juma’a prayer, on the country’s leading channel, MBC. It accused me of being trained by CANVAS (The Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies), a nonprofit organization based in Serbia that advocates nonviolent resistance against dictatorships. I had appeared on a panel in Washington, D.C., with one of the heads of CANVAS, Srdja Popovic—we had both been named on a list of 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. The Saudi TV report used footage from the event and footage of an interview with Popovic, where he praised me as “inspiring,” to “prove [I] was a CANVAS trainee.”
The pressure became so intense that I locked myself inside my home on the Aramco compound, while packing to move from my town house and trying to figure out what to do next. Vital Voices, an American NGO started by Hillary Clinton and former secretary of state Madeline Albright and dedicated to supporting and empowering female leaders, gave me a global leadership award. But I could not make the trip to Washington, D.C., due to the threats and fears for my safety. I realized I had no choice; I had to leave Saudi Arabia.
I thought first of Bahrain, which is just on the other side of the causeway from Dammam, but there was too much political unrest and instability. I settled on Dubai. But I would not be going alone.
In 2010, a Brazilian consultant joined my division at Aramco. His name was Rafael. We were nodding acquaintances for two years until one day when I started talking with a small group of friends, planning a barbecue. He was standing nearby and said, “You should try Brazilian barbecue.”
I said, “Okay, you come over with us and make it.” We stayed friends, but I never thought he was interested in me.