On the fourth day of the protests, Safai and her husband, one of the leaders of the protest, led a student rally of hundreds of thousands of people.However, Ayatollah Khamenei saw the protests as a threat to the Iranian regime and ordered Hassan Rohani, then head of the security services and now former president of Iran, to end the protests. Safai and her husband were on their way back in a car on the fifth day when they were notified by a friend that the security forces had raided their apartment. Her husband fled into the crowd and went into hiding, while she drove to her parents.