Hasan Minhaj addresses lies about NorCal upbringing

One month after a New Yorker profile accused comedian Hasan Minhaj of fabricating stories from his adolescence in Davis, California, the comedian released a response in which he criticized the article, calling it “needlessly misleading.”

In the 20-minute video statement, which he released to the Hollywood Reporter, Minhaj disputed the New Yorker’s characterization of events, said he was “being accused of faking racism,” defended his falsifications as creative choices and apologized to fans he may have misled.

“To anyone who felt betrayed or hurt by my stand-up, I am sorry,” the comedian said. “I made artistic choices to express myself and drive home larger issues affecting me and my community, and I feel horrible that I let people down.” 

The New Yorker article, titled “Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths,’” addresses discrepancies in three stories from Minhaj’s stand-up specials and weighs the value of truth in comedy and where to draw the line when potentially identifiable people are involved. 

Minhaj admits to making up details for the sake of the story but said in his video response that the New Yorker’s presentation of facts made him look like a “proper f—king psycho,” he said.

For example, in one story from his stand-up special “Homecoming King,” Minhaj recounts asking a white friend — whom he gives the pseudonym “Bethany” — to prom at Davis Senior High School, only to arrive at her doorstep and see her getting ready with another boy. In his telling, his friend’s mother pulled him aside and privately explained that the prom photos were going to family members, implying that her daughter needed a date who would be palatable to family — in other words, somebody who wasn’t Indian. 

The New Yorker found that Minhaj was in fact rejected a few days before prom by Bethany, not at the doorstep, citing an interview with her. The New Yorker asserted that “Minhaj acknowledged that this was correct, but he said that the two of them had long carried different understandings of her rejection.” 

Minhaj’s problem with the article, he said, is that its phrasing implied that there wasn’t necessarily racism involved. In his video rebuttal, he showed a screenshot of an email he received from Bethany when they were both adults in which she alluded to her parents’ racism.

“Getting rejected from prom because of my race — 1,000 percent true,” he said. 

Throughout his video response, Minhaj pulled out more than a dozen other screenshots of texts and emails, and he even played back clips from the New Yorker interview to show how quotes were spliced or cut off to support his perspective that the publication treated him unfairly. 

In another story from the stand-up special “The King’s Jester,” Minhaj lied about being slammed on the hood of a police car after being entrapped by a white FBI agent who infiltrated his NorCal mosque. Minhaj acknowledged that the story was fabricated but said that it combined two true stories to convey the paranoia many young Muslims felt in the early 2000s. 

Minhaj blended the story of Hamid Hayat, a Muslim man living in Northern California who spent years in prison after making a coerced confession, with his experience of being pushed to the ground during a game of pickup basketball by a man he suspected was an undercover officer. 

In his video response, Minhaj pulled up a screenshot of a text conversation with Hayat, who thanked him for telling the story. 

“You haven’t down or diminished about my story,” one text from Hayat reads. “Nothing but love and respect for you.”

The third story Minhaj addresses in his video, which takes place in New York, is about receiving an envelope in the mail containing a white powder. In his stand-up special, he said he believed that the white powder was anthrax, though the New Yorker story said he only joked that it was. He similarly disputes the New Yorker’s characterizations while acknowledging other fictionalized aspects of the story.

“The majority of my stories are true,” he said. “But the article led with the opposite.”