Elmahdy says that she liked the attention, but that she was also receiving messages from men on Facebook who threatened to kill her. The threats were unsettling, but it was also an exciting time. She had no idea what it meant when her cat disappeared a few weeks after she had published the photo.

A man called her to say that he had found the cat. She was alone when she went to see him, but the man was waiting for her with a friend. The friend locked the door to the apartment, and the man tried to pull Elmahdy’s pants off, saying that it was what she deserved for posting a naked picture of herself. But when Elmahdy kept fighting off the men, they stole her wallet and mobile phone and released her the next morning.

After that night, Elmahdy sensed that the photo could destroy her life if she stayed in Egypt. Ten days later, she boarded a plane in Cairo and fled to Sweden. That was in March 2012.

Elmahdy had become a threat, because she was encouraging other women to imitate her. In the CNN interview, when asked how she sees women in the “New Egypt,” she said: “I am not positive at all unless a social revolution erupts.”