At the age of 22, Safai married her husband Saeed Bashirtash. She studied dentistry at the University of capital. During her final year of college, she took part in student protests in her university in 1999 in response to the revocation of the license of the reformist Iranian newspaper Salam, which quickly grew into a widespread protest against the Iranian regime. 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.