 Mahmood's name appeared in the WikiLeaks documents, in the material obtained from the Turkish President (then Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's son-in-law Berat Albayrak.As a professor, Saba Mahmood worked with Erdoğan's daughter Esra Albayrak, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley.In her e-mails dated December 2013 and March 2014—a period when the political environment in Turkey became particularly oppressive, with human rights violations targeting the government's critics across the political spectrum in the aftermath of the Gezi Park protests—Mahmood noted her awareness of "how hard [that] past year [had] been for [Esra Albayrak], [her] family, and for Turkey in general," expressing her solidarity with Albayrak and "her struggle."