A month after Iran release, Hingham man has 'no desire' to return

HINGHAM - On a recent morning Matt Trevithick was sitting inside Redeye Roasters at Hingham Harbor, sipping a cup of Sumatran coffee as he watched other customers come and go.

The 30-year-old Hingham native and Boston University graduate has been savoring such small pleasures since he got home Jan. 16, after 41 days of solitary confinement in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison.

“I’m finally myself again,” he said.

In an exclusive Patriot Ledger interview, Trevithick said he’s sleeping well and already looking forward to resuming work in Turkey, with a small refugee-aid service he and a friend started.

But he said Turkey is as close to Iran and the rest of the Middle East as he’s going to venture for the foreseeable future.

“Iran and I are good for now,” he said. “I have no desire to go back.”

Trevithick went to Iran last fall to study Farsi, the nation’s official language, after waiting five years for a student visa. By early December he was preparing to leave early, when he was detained and repeatedly interrogated without official charges.

He was released just as abruptly, reportedly with the intervention of Secretary of State John Kerry. He left Iran the same day as Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian and three other high-profile American prisoners.

Unlike them, few outside Trevithick’s family and the State Department knew he’d been detained. His mother Amelia Newcomb learned of his release when President Barack Obama called to tell her.

After seven years in the region – including four years on staff at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul – Trevithick said already felt that chapter of his life was coming to an end. The Iran detention turned out to be a nerve-wracking punctuation mark.

“I’d visited Iran before, so I know it’s a police state,” he said. “That’s why everything I did was simple and predictable. Nothing questionable.”

He was arrested anyway – he said he’s “100 percent certain” it was a way for the security forces to “throw the hardliners a bone” in reaction to the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the U.S. and other world powers.

He said other Westerners have been held from time to time for much the same reason.

“It’s part of a consistent behavior that’s not widely known in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s easy to go to Iran as a tourist. Anything else is tricky.”

Trevithick said he wasn’t beaten or tortured at Evin Prison. His captors did demand that he confess to being an American spy. He refused – in Farsi.

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