Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival is a memoir by Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari with Aimee Molloy, chronicling Bahari's family history, and his arrest and 118-day imprisonment following the controversial 2009 Iran presidential election. It was published by Random House in 2011.

It was developed into a film called Rosewater in 2014.

Iranian-born but living in the West since college, Bahari is in Iran to cover the 2009 presidential election and staying with his elderly mother in Tehran. He witnesses the massive support, enthusiasm and optimism of the reformist presidential campaign; the outrage and protest of reformist voters after the election results shows their candidate(s) losing by an improbably large margin; and the often brutal crackdown of the regime against the protesters and sometimes innocent bystanders.

Bahari is anxious to get back to London to be with his pregnant fiancée, Paola (who tells him "Come home, Mazi. We need you"), but not worried about running afoul of the Islamic regime as (he thinks) he has all the necessary accreditations and has taken all the recommended precautions to avoid trouble. From his father he has heard harrowing tales of prison torture and misery under the Shah, and he has visited his sister in prison in the 1980s during the early years of the Ayatollah Khomeini regime. When he is arrested on June 21 at his mother's house, Bahari first believes it must be a mistake and he will soon be released.

Bahari is taken to Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, given a small, bare cell which he leaves only for short exercise periods and much longer interrogation sessions. His arrester and regular interrogator (whom Bahari nicknames "Rosewater" for his fragrance of choice), is a large man who explodes into rage without warning, slapping and beating Bahari, sometimes aggravating his migraine headaches until it feels like his "head was going to explode." Using psychological or "white" torture, Rosewater threatens Bahari with the possibility of "every tactic necessary" to make him talk, including interrogation up to fifteen hours a day for four to six years. Bahari is told he will rot in prison (until the jailers "put your bones in a bag and throw it at your mother's doorstep!"), or is soon to be executed as an example to others (I will make sure you die before Ramadan, Mazi, ... but I will also make sure that I smash your handsome face first). Bahari is assured he was "forgotten" and serving time for people who are laughing at you.' ("There are campaigns for everyone in this prison – even the most unknown of the prisoners – but nothing for you" he laughed). When this turns out not to be the case and he is allowed to call his wife, Rosewater listens in and mocks Bahari's declarations of love to his wife.

These threats and beatings are sometimes combined with blandishments, such as offers of Nescafé instant coffee and fruit, and promises that "we are going to be friends". On a couple of occasions his jailers proudly proclaim their "Islamic kindness," and on another he is asked rhetorically after weeks of beatings by Rosewater, "have I ever tortured you?" (obviously expecting "no" for an answer). Occasionally Bahari would be startled by his interrogators' ignorance of politics and culture outside the Islamic Republic. He is accused of being an agent of four foreign intelligence organizations: CIA, MI6, Mossad, and Newsweek. Rosewater is fixated on the American state of New Jersey as "famous". Following the premise that mixing of the sexes must inevitably lead to illicit sex, Rosewater spends much time hoping to shame Bahari by forcing him to list women he had worked with.

Compounding Bahari's suffering was the guilt he felt not only over his pregnant fiancée alone in London, but also over the suffering of his 80+ year old widowed mother who lived alone and whose daughter had died five months earlier. All these facts his jailers reminded him of:

We do not want to harm you. We do not want your wife to raise the child alone. I do not want your child to grow up an orphan. Is it a boy or a girl? ... And you have a mother who has lost two children and her husband in the past four years.'