Who is ‘Morticia Addams’, the woman who first set Khamenei’s photo on fire and started a movement?

New Delhi: Iran has been for some time caught up in a spate of protest, the current of which started against the country’s economic state but have spiralled into a larger anti-establishment unrest. Protests are mass movements, and often throw up representative symbols of disagreement organically, which come to symbolise them both during the unrest and later.

In the context of the current Iran protests, some such striking visuals swept across social media which captured global attention and imagination as to the state of the Iranian protests. These pertain to pictures of young women lighting cigarettes with a burning picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The burning of an image of Iran’s most powerful cleric is a rare act against the sanctity surrounding him in Iran. This became a major reason for the image being so powerful and representative, combined with the message it sends about Iranian women movements, another point of contention in the country’s recent political struggles.

The woman in the viral video is known online by the pseudonym Morticia Addams, taken from the matriarch of the fictional ‘Addams Family’. While a staple of popular culture with many movies, cartoons and TV series made around the character, a recent Netflix Production titled ‘Wednesday’ reintroduced the character in the zeitgeist.

The woman who is now being touted as being the first to use the image of lighting a cigarette with a portrait of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reportedly uses this name on social media platforms such as X. In social media she identifies herself as a "radical feminist”.

The video which shows her performing this act was reportedly filmed in Canada, where she now has refugee status and lives in Toronto. Importantly the video was not shot within Iran itself and for safety reasons she has chosen not to publicly reveal her real name, but her act has certainly had massive reverberations across the world.

Morticia says her act was meant as a message of solidarity. She filmed the act on January 7, 2026, just before Iran imposed a near-total internet blackout. She says her aim was to show support for demonstrators inside Iran when she was unable to be there physically.

Before coming to Canada, she reportedly experienced repeated clashes with Iranian authorities. As her story is being reported, she was first arrested at 17 during the "bloody November” protests of 2019 in Iran and later also participated against protests that occurred in the country in opposition to mandatory hijab rules during nationwide unrest following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.

The image of the burning Khamenei photos emerged amid a fresh wave of unrest across Iran that began in late December 2025 in Tehran and later spread nationwide. What started as protests against economic dissatisfaction later turned into demonstrations around larger dissatisfaction with the ruling establishment. While not the first protests in recent times, they are some of the most vociferous ones seen in a long time.

Add TV9 English As A Trusted Source

The government’s response has been severe, with reports of deaths, mass arrests, and widespread internet shutdowns. At the same time, images and slogans from the protests have circulated internationally, leading to solidarity demonstrations by the Iranian diaspora.

The current unrest is part of a longer history of resistance in Iran, particularly around women’s rights and state control. In 2022, the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for allegedly violating mandatory hijab rules, triggered nationwide protests. Women played a central role in these demonstrations, openly challenging dress codes, morality policing, and gender discrimination. The legacy of those protests is being carried in the present ones as well.