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Sayed Bozorg Mahmoody, known as “Moody”, was the Iranian-born anaesthesiologist who took his American wife Betty and their young daughter Mahtob to Iran in 1984 and refused to
Sayed Bozorg Mahmoody, known as “Moody”, was the Iranian-born anaesthesiologist who took his American wife Betty and their young daughter Mahtob to Iran in 1984 and refused to let them return home, holding them for eighteen months before they escaped over the mountains into Turkey. His story became the basis for Betty’s 1987 memoir Not Without My Daughter and the 1991 film of the same name, in which he was played by Alfred Molina. Sayed Mahmoody died in Tehran in August 2009, aged 70.
If you’ve read the book, watched the film, or simply seen it mentioned somewhere and wondered what became of the real people involved, this covers what’s actually known: who Sayed Mahmoody was, what happened after Betty and Mahtob escaped, and where the family stands today.
Sayed Bozorg Mahmoody was born around 1938 or 1939 in Shushtar, Iran, to a family his own book later described as prominent. Both of his parents were doctors, and both died while he was still a child. His father died when Mahmoody was a toddler, and his mother when he was eight, leaving his older sister to raise him.
He left Iran at 18 to study English in London, then moved to the United States in 1961. In America, he built an unusually varied career: he worked as a university mathematics professor and engineer, spent part of the 1960s working for NASA, then went back to medical school and trained as an anaesthesiologist. That’s a genuinely striking career arc, from spaceflight-era engineering to operating theatres, and it’s one of the details often left out of shorter summaries of his story.
Before meeting Sayed, Betty (born Betty Lover, on 9 June 1945) had already been married once. She had two sons from that earlier marriage, Joseph and John, who were 13 and 9 years older than Mahtob respectively. Public sources don’t name Betty’s first husband, and neither Betty’s own writing nor Wikipedia’s record of her life identifies him, so this article isn’t going to guess at a name that hasn’t been confirmed anywhere reliable.
What is documented is the timeline: that first marriage ended before Betty met Sayed Mahmoody in 1974. The two dated for three years, with Betty giving him the nickname “Moody”, and they married in Houston in 1977.
Sayed and Betty met in 1974 and married in Houston, Texas, in 1977, after Sayed had qualified and begun working as a licensed anaesthesiologist in the US. According to Sayed’s own account, Betty proposed to him, converted to Islam, and took a genuine interest in Persian culture during their courtship. The couple settled in Texas, and their daughter Mahtob, whose name means “moonlight” in Persian, was born in Houston on 4 September 1979. Sayed said he chose the name after being struck by a full moon.
The family later relocated to Michigan. By most contemporary accounts, this was, for years, an ordinary American professional household: a doctor husband, a homemaker wife, and eventually a young daughter who split her early life between Texas and Michigan.
In August 1984, Sayed persuaded Betty that their daughter deserved to meet his family in Iran, framing it as a two week holiday. With help from a nephew, he convinced a reluctant Betty to agree. The family left the US on 4 August 1984.
Two weeks in, Sayed told Betty they would not be returning to America. When she protested, he struck her, the first time Mahtob had seen her father hit her mother. Betty later fell seriously ill with dysentery, and Mahtob stayed by her mother’s side, watching for signs she might be given an injection Betty feared could be fatal.
Betty and Mahtob were held in Iran for eighteen months. Under Iranian law of the time, Sayed, as the Iranian-born father, held full custody rights over Mahtob, which left Betty with almost no legal standing to simply take her daughter and leave. Betty later wrote that Sayed threatened, “If you try to leave this house again, I will kill you,” a line that became one of the defining quotes of her memoir.
The Escape Over the Zagros Mountains
After eighteen months, Betty and Mahtob escaped Iran with help from a network of sympathetic Iranians, travelling roughly 500 miles over the snowy Zagros Mountains into Turkey. From there, they made their way back to the United States, arriving home in 1986. Mahtob never saw her father again after that escape.
Betty filed for divorce once they were safely back in the US, and it was finalised in 1989. The scale of what they’d been through, and the fact that so few American families in similar situations had managed to get out, is a large part of why Betty’s account resonated so widely once she went public with it.
Betty published Not Without My Daughter in 1987, co-written with William Hoffer. The book sold roughly 12 million copies worldwide and became a defining account of international parental abduction for a generation of readers. MGM-Pathé adapted it into a film in 1991, with Sally Field playing Betty and Alfred Molina playing Sayed. The film made around $30 million at the box office and cemented the story in mainstream culture well beyond people who’d read the book.
Sayed didn’t recognise himself in Molina’s portrayal. Asked about it afterwards, he reportedly said he was short, bald, and wore glasses, with no physical resemblance to the actor cast to play him, and questioned how realistic the rest of the film could be if that detail was wrong. Separately, Molina was assaulted at one point by a man who apparently objected to how brutally the film portrayed Moody, a strange footnote that shows how much the film shaped public feeling about the real Sayed Mahmoody.
For two decades after the book and film came out, Sayed stayed largely silent in the Western press. That changed with a 2002 documentary, Without My Daughter, made by Alexis Kouros and Kari Tervo, which let Sayed tell his side of events and showed his attempts to contact Mahtob. He also wrote his own book, Lost Without My Daughter, which challenges several of Betty’s central claims, including disputing her portrayal of him and offering an alternative account of what happened between them and why he kept his family in Iran.
It’s worth being straightforward about this: Sayed’s version and Betty’s version disagree on significant points, including who initiated the abuse and how the marriage broke down before the Iran trip. Betty’s account is the one that reached the widest audience, given the scale of the book and film, but Sayed’s book exists specifically to contest it, so readers weighing the full story may want to look at both rather than treat either as the final word.
Sayed also claimed that on the night before 11 September 2001, he learned he had a US green card and was, at that point, living just a few blocks from Betty’s home in Michigan. According to Betty, once he was later placed on a terrorist list, he was never allowed back into the United States. He remained in Iran for the rest of his life. He died in Tehran on 23 August 2009, at the age of 70, with the cause of death given as renal disease.
Mahtob Mahmoody grew up in Alpena, Michigan, and now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At 13, she was diagnosed with lupus and survived thanks to experimental treatment at the time, a serious health chapter that ran alongside the more famous story of her childhood in Iran.
In 2015, Mahtob published her own memoir, My Name is Mahtob, widely seen as a companion to her mother’s book, giving her own perspective on the same events from the vantage point of the daughter rather than the mother. In interviews around that book, including one with NPR in November 2015, Mahtob said she had forgiven her father, six years after his death, describing the moment he told the family they weren’t leaving Iran as the moment “my daddy died” in her eyes, even though the man himself lived on for another 25 years.
Public sources, including her Wikipedia entry and the interviews she’s given around her book, don’t confirm a marriage or a spouse for Mahtob. If she has married, it hasn’t been reported anywhere reliably enough to state as fact here, so this is genuinely one of the details that isn’t publicly settled.
If you’ve searched some version of “Moody Mahmoody today”, the honest answer is that there isn’t one. Sayed Mahmoody, the real Moody, died in 2009. Any content describing his current life, opinions or whereabouts as if he were still alive is either out of date or simply wrong.
Public records and Betty’s own biography, including her Wikipedia entry, list only the one marriage to Sayed Mahmoody, from 1977 to their 1989 divorce. There’s no reliable record of Betty remarrying after that divorce. She’s continued to work as an author and public speaker, and co-founded the organisation One World: For Children, which supports families affected by international custody disputes, work that grew directly out of her own experience.
Sayed Mahmoody was the Iranian-born anaesthesiologist and former husband of author Betty Mahmoody, known as “Moody” in her memoir Not Without My Daughter. He held Betty and their daughter Mahtob in Iran for eighteen months in 1984 and 1985 before they escaped.
No. Sayed Mahmoody died in Tehran on 23 August 2009, at the age of 70. The cause of death was given as renal disease.
Alfred Molina played Sayed “Moody” Mahmoody in the 1991 film adaptation, opposite Sally Field as Betty. Sayed later said he didn’t think the casting resembled him physically at all.
Yes, broadly. It’s based on Betty Mahmoody’s own account of being held in Iran with her daughter in 1984 and 1985, though Sayed disputed parts of her version in his own later book, Lost Without My Daughter.
There’s no reliable public record of Betty remarrying after her divorce from Sayed Mahmoody was finalised in 1989. She has continued her work as an author, speaker and children’s rights advocate.
This isn’t publicly confirmed. Mahtob has spoken openly about her childhood, her health, and forgiving her father in interviews, but hasn’t discussed a marriage or spouse in any source used for this article.
She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, having grown up in Alpena, Michigan. She published her own memoir, My Name is Mahtob, in 2015.
No. According to Mahtob and Betty’s accounts, Mahtob never saw her father again after the escape from Iran in 1986, though Sayed did attempt to contact her later in life, which is documented in the 2002 documentary Without My Daughter.
This hasn’t been publicly named. Betty had two sons, Joseph and John, from a marriage before she met Sayed Mahmoody in 1974, but the identity of that first husband isn’t part of the public record.
