 Seierstad won an appeal which overturned the previous ruling and cleared the author and her publisher, Cappelen Damm, of invading the privacy of the Rais family, and concluded that the facts of the book were accurate.During a trip to Scandinavia in November 2005, Rais declared he was seeking asylum in either Norway or Sweden, as a political refugee.He felt things revealed about him in Seierstad's book had made life for him and his family unsafe in Afghanistan, where bootleg versions of the book had been published in Persian.