Over a month after the New Yorker’s profile on him, Hasan Minhaj has responded to the piece in which he admitted to fabricating parts of his stand-up act. His response comes in the form of a 20-minute video that contains recordings from the original New Yorker profile.
“To everyone who read that article,” Minhaj said in the video, which you can watch above, “I want to answer the biggest question that’s probably on your mind: Is Hasan Minhaj secretly a psycho?”
“I’m not a psycho. But this New Yorker article definitely made me look like one,” the comedian continued. “It was so needlessly misleading, not just about my stand-up, but also about me as a person. The truth is, racism, FBI surveillance and the threats to my family happened. And I said this on the record.”
The comedian also explained why he “took a beat before responding” to the article that came out on Sept. 15, saying that “like you, I’ve been paralyzed by the news coming out of the Middle East. I have been processing all the criticism that’s come my way.” Hamas’ attack on Israel happened Oct. 7.
Minhaj then proceeded to do what he calls “the most Hasan Minhaj thing ever” and launched into a deep dive into his own scandal complete with graphics. Specifically, he focused on three exaggerated stories that were highlighted in the New Yorker article: being rejected by his prom date due to his race, getting slammed on a car by an undercover F.B.I. informant who infiltrated Minhaj’s community mosque and the anthrax scare he had in his home that allegedly led to his daughter going to the hospital.
Once again, Minhaj admitted that the latter two — and far more serious — stories were exaggerated.
The comedian said he gave the New Yorker “so much evidence that they ignored” when it comes to these three stories. Most of that evidence is related to the prom story. Though Minhaj said in the video that “I don’t give a s–t about prom,” a third of the 21-minute video is devoted to the incident.
The first piece of evidence Minhaj provided to counteract the New Yorker article are emails from “Bethany,” the white woman who rejected Minhaj from prom allegedly due to his race. In both the New Yorker’s account and in Minhaj’s defense, the comedian admits his rejection did not happen on her doorstep as claimed in his special “Homecoming King” but days before, a detail the woman in question corroborates.
Minhaj said the New Yorker’s account “makes it sound like I got friend-zoned by Bethany and then I turned into an angry incel and faked racism to get back at her.” To prove this rejection was due to his race and not due to differing accounts, he leaked emails from “Bethany” after her marriage to an Indian American man that were sent in 2015. In one of her responses, she wrote, “I think my parents have come a long way, too,” a detail Minhaj pointed to as proof that her and her parents’ rejection of him originally stemmed from racism.
Minhaj also disputed “Bethany’s” claim that he invited her to an Off Broadway performance of “Homecoming King” to “humiliate her” and that he insufficiently disguised her identity. In the New Yorker article, she claimed this led to personal threats and being doxxed. As proof he was not to blame for this doxxing, he provided emails in which he said he put “Bethany” in contact with fact checkers from “This American Life,” invited her to the Netflix press party and asked her to delete a social media post that could possibly reveal her identity.
The other two stories Minhaj defends are far graver than a prom date gone wrong. In both cases he admitted to embellishing stories in his stand-up act and apologized to audiences.
“Hasan Minhaj confirms in this video that he selectively presents information and embellishes to make a point: exactly what we reported,” the New Yorker said in a statement. “Our piece, which includes Minhaj’s perspective at length, was carefully reported and fact-checked. It is based on interviews with more than 20 people, including former ‘Patriot Act’ and ‘Daily Show’ staffers; members of Minhaj’s security team; and people who have been the subject of his stand-up work, including the former F.B.I. informant ‘Brother Eric’ and the woman at the center of his prom-rejection story. We stand by our story.”
In his special “The King’s Jester” Minhaj tells the story of Brother Eric, an F.B.I. informant who gains the trust of his mosque community and slams the comedian on the roof of a car after Minhaj messes with him. Both in the New Yorker article and in his defense, Minhaj admitted that Brother Eric wasn’t real and he was not Craig Monteilh, the real-life informant who spied on Islamic communities and whom Minhaj claims harassed him as a teenager. Instead, he said the character was an amalgamation of undercover agents in his community he knew about as a teenager.
In the video, he apologized for the story. “The truth is I did have altercations with undercover law enforcement growing up and that experience formed the basis of this story, but it didn’t go down exactly like this,” Minhaj said. “My intention wasn’t to take away from these stories. It was to spotlight them in my special.”
Finally, the comedian detailed the oddest of his exaggerated stories, the anthrax scare. In “The King’s Jester,” Minhaj claimed that a letter containing a fine white powder was sent to his home as part of the backlash to his work on Netflix’s “Patriot Act.” In the special as well as in other interviews, Minhaj claimed that the powder, which was believed to be anthrax, fell onto his daughter who was rushed to the hospital.
In both the New Yorker article and in this video, Minhaj admitted this story was embellished. The comedian now says the a letter with white powder was sent to his apartment in February of 2019 after Netflix pulled an episode of “Patriot Act” that was critical of Saudi Arabia. The powder spilled on the kitchen counter, which was near Minhaj’s daughter, but the child never came in contact with the substance and there was never a hospital visit.
“I created the hospital scene to put the audience in that same shock and fear that me and Beena [Patel] felt playing out that night,” Minhaj said of his wife. As for why he never told Netflix about the anthrax scare, he said he didn’t do so out of fear Netflix would shut down “Patriot Act.”
Minhaj spends the last few minutes of this response directly criticizing the New Yorker over the final lines in the original article, in which Minhaj is quoted as saying, “the emotional truth is first. The factual truth is secondary.” Minhaj said that statement referred to his persona as a storyteller and not as a political comedian and host of series like “The Daily Show” and “Patriot Act.”
“With [political comedy] the truth comes first, comedy sometimes comes second to make the infotainment the sugar on the medicine. In [stand-up], the emotional truth is first, the factual truth is secondary,” Minhaj said in his original interview with the New Yorker.
Though Minhaj insisted in the video that fact checking was paramount to series like “The Daily Show” and “Patriot Act,” the comedian never addressed the accusations that researchers were kicked out of the “Patriot Act” writers’ room.
“Fact-checking at ‘Patriot Act’ was extremely rigorous,” Minhaj told the New Yorker in a written statement in the original article.
The Hollywood Reporter was the first to obtain Minhaj’s video.
