Trump Says 8 Iranian Women Were Saved Thanks to Him, but Tehran Says It Never Planned to Kill Them

President Donald Trump stepped into the center of Iran's human rights crisis with a triumphant message that read like a rescue announcement. "Very good news!" he wrote, saying he had just been informed that eight women protesters who were to be executed that night in Iran would no longer be killed. He added that four would be released immediately and four others would instead serve one month in prison.

For a few hours on this Wednesday, April 22, it looked like the White House had pulled off an extraordinary last-minute intervention. Then Tehran answered back.

Iran's judiciary said Trump had been "misled once again by fake news" and denied the women had been on the verge of execution at all, insisting that some had already been released and that the others, if convicted, faced prison rather than death. To make things worse, it said that the images of the women posted at Trump's Truth Social account were AI-generated.

That clash instantly turned Trump's post into a bigger story than the statement itself and became a test of credibility in a time of heightened tensions between Iran and the United States.

Reports cited by the New York Post said at least one of the women, Bita Hemmati, had indeed been sentenced to death in connection with the January protests, according to rights groups including HRANA and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center. But the same reporting also said two of the eight women named in activist campaigns, Golnaz Naraghi and Venus Hosseininejad, had already been out on bail since late March.

This is not the first time Trump has claimed to have stopped executions in Iran. In January that he said Tehran had called off 800 hangings after U.S. pressure during the worst unrest Iran had seen since the 1979 revolution. Iran rejected that claim too. In a later Reuters report, Iranian officials again denied that such a mass halt had taken place, underscoring a pattern that has repeated itself this year: Trump claims a reprieve, Tehran calls it fiction, and rights groups continue documenting arrests, death sentences, and executions anyway.

Trump's announcement came the same day international media reported a fresh escalation in the Strait of Hormuz after Iran seized vessels and regional tensions deepened, even as Trump indefinitely extended a ceasefire with Iran without any certainty that real diplomacy would follow.