Persian Jewish culture emerges as key issue in courtroom
By DAVE DANFORTH Daily Press Staff Writer
The plate on her Mercedes reads “TIKEH” — Persian for what roughly translates into “hot piece” or “babe.”
But Afsaneh Mobasser declared she’s since put on 60 pounds since she first drove the car five years ago. She’s also frequently depressed, often can’t sleep, and doubts she could be intimate with a man.
But when her estranged husband sued for the return of the Mercedes or its value, she struck back in court, opening up a closet with a secret so dark she says she dared not tell even her mother.
Mobasser’s legal tussle with Bahram Anav ended Friday in Santa Monica Superior Court. The two-week jury trial lasted as long as their 1996 marriage. The legal fees appeared to vastly exceed the amounts sought in court from both Mobasser and Anav.
The case ultimately focused on vast cultural differences when a Santa Monica jury was asked to penalize Mobasser for the outspoken materialism both sides said surrounds the courtship and marriage ritual in the close-knit Persian Jewish community.
It wasn’t a rape case, although Mobasser, now 36, and her attorney, tried their best to turn it into one. Nor was it merely about a Mercedes and $26,000 Anav, 42, claimed she took from him in bad faith and kept even after the legal ties, whatever they were, became annulled in 1997.
Anav filed the case in 1999 in pursuit of the $17,171 he put down on the car and some $19,000-plus in cash gifts. Mobasser’s attorney then threw in the legal equivalent of everything but the kitchen sink at Anav, countersuing for the anguish of a long-suppressed rape and loss of earnings Mobasser said she endured, despite her training as an electrical engineer at Santa Monica College and UCLA.
Anav claimed the gifts were given in contemplation of a loving marriage which never really happened, alleging Mobasser had spurned him before legally “converting” his cash and the car he’d bought. She replied that they were gifts, and that the marriage ended in the blink of an eye because he had courted her, raped her, and then left, filing for divorce. She also claimed that Anav gave her a case of HPV — common genital warts, and that she’d paid over $42,000 to keep the Mercedes.
But most poignantly, Mobasser claimed she felt forced against her will to marry Anav because the options in her culture left her with little choice after he took her virginity at age 31.
“Miserable as I was, I did not want this divorce,” she told the jury. “He told me, ‘I’ve done this to you but I will be a good husband... a faithful husband.’”
Mobasser said she had never been physically attracted to Anav but gave him repeated reprieves after he showered her with flowers and cards.
Anav told a different story, insisting the affair was a love story. Portraying Mobasser as a sexual aggressor, he blamed her mother for the break up, suggesting that the mother felt Anav wasn’t wealthy enough for her. He also suggested that the mother, who arrived from Tehran in 1996 12 years after her daughter, was competing with him for her affections.
“I was in love with her... I never loved anyone the way I loved her,” he told the jury.
Anav said the two had made love about a month and a half into their relationship — an event Mobasser characterized as a rape. They married 24 days after the Oct. 24, 1996 encounter. In Persian custom, the groom stages the ceremony, which Mobasser said shocked her as far beneath her dream of a large celebration. The marriage was over by the end of November, shortly after a week-long Hawaiian trip Anav characterized as a honeymoon while Mobasser said was marked repeatedly by sexual abuse.
In his final summation to the jury, Louis Dell, Anav’s attorney, chose the risky strategy of portraying Mobasser as a cold materialist in quest of his client’s money. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is absolutely wrong in this world,” he declared.
Mobasser’s lawyer, Derek Tabone, placed her wedding portrait — in her “TIKEH” days — on the witness stand. Motioning towards it, he asked the jury to consider “what turned that person into the woman you see here?”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 11, 2002. Read the original PDF.