Everyone knows CNN’s International Correspondent, Christiane Amanpour. If you don’t, you don’t know what you’re missing. 

Christiane Amanpour, an award-winning CNN journalist, had to cancel the interview with Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi after he demanded that she don a headscarf for their interview, which she refused to do.

“Here in New York, or anywhere else outside of Iran, I have never been asked by any Iranian president – and I have interviewed every single one of them since 1995 – either inside or outside of Iran, never been asked to wear a headscarf,” she said on CNN’s “New Day” program on Thursday. 

The Chief International Anchor for CNN and the host of her own popular CNN International nightly program “Amanpour” was supposed to interview the Iranian president at the UN offices in New York City on Wednesday at the annual United Nations General Assembly.

Amanpour posted a thread on Twitter explaining the chronology of events leading up to the cancellation. She explained that after weeks of planning by her and her crew, they were ready, but the Iranian president was late for the meeting. Forty minutes after the scheduled time, his aide came into the room and said President Raisi wanted her to wear a headscarf since it was the holy month of Muharram and Safar.

Although Amanpour had worn headscarves for interviews numerous times before while in countries like Iran and Afghanistan, she said that she would not allow the president to command her to wear a headscarf in a country where it was not required by law.

She did this in solidarity with women in Iran who were protesting the death of a young woman who died at the hands of Iran’s morality police.

Amanpour is Iranian and grew up in Tehran, Iran. She declined the demand, saying that she was in New York, and there was no law forcing her to wear a headscarf. She pointed out to President Raisi that no other Iranian president had required her to wear a headscarf when interviewing outside Iran.

Amanpour added that when the aide came in, she made it clear that the interview would not happen unless Amanpour wore a headscarf and that it was a matter of respect. The aide also referred to the matter in Iran over the protests in the country.

The interview would have been President Raisi’s first interview in the US. Amongst the things that Amanpour was going to ask him was about was the protests in Iran over the death of Mahsa Amini.

Amini, 22, died in the country’s morality police custody after they took her in for wearing her hijab too loosely. She collapsed at the police station and later died in a hospital. The death of the 22-year-old has triggered protests all over Iran, as women all over the country removed their state-mandated headscarves (hijabs) and openly burned them in protest.

Iranian authorities said that the young woman died of a heart attack, even though her postmortem exam showed that she had severe head injuries.

Amini’s death has triggered the anger festering in the hearts of many Iranians over the regime’s restrictions on personal freedoms.

Iran’s largest Telecom operator reportedly shut down mobile internet access on Thursday to prevent the protests from blowing up.

Iranian law states that all women must wear a head covering in public. The law has been enforced in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and applies to all women in the country, even tourists and visitors.

In addition to the protests, Amanpour had planned to speak to the president about the nuclear deal with the US and Iran’s support for Russia amid the Russia-Ukraine war.