Hasan Minhaj Rips 'Needlessly Misleading' Report He Fabricated Stand-Up Stories

Comedian Hasan Minhaj has issued a response to a controversial profile in The New Yorker, which accused the Patriot Act host of falsifying details in his stand-up act.

Minhaj has remained largely silent since the September 15th publication. Early on, he made one statement in which he confirmed “all my standup stories are based on events that happened to me.” However, in a new, 21-minute video released exclusively to The Hollywood Reporter, Minhaj called the profile “needlessly misleading,” and raised questions about its accuracy.

“There were omissions and factual errors in The New Yorker article that misrepresented my life story, so I wanted to give people the context and materials I provided The New Yorker with full transparency,” Minhaj said in the video.

Minhaj goes on to show the same texts and emails he and his team provided to reporter Clare Malone and The New Yorker’s fact checkers. It paints a radically different picture than what was published. The No Hard Feelings actor admits to combining, simplifying, or otherwise fictionalizing certain elements of his standup specials, but pushes back against Malone’s more audacious claims.

Malone alleges that Minhaj’s story about being dumped by his prom date because her parents did not want her pictured with “a brown boy” was not only untrue, but led to his former date being doxxed. Minhaj presents evidence to the contrary.

He was turned down by his date, whom he gives the pseudonym Bethany Reed, but admits that it wasn’t as he arrived to pick her up for the dance, as the story goes. “Bethany’s mom really did say that—it was just a few days before prom,” Minhaj said in his statement. “I created the doorstep scene to drop the audience into the feeling of that moment, which I told the reporter.” He then plays a clip of himself regaling Malone with the same tale.

“My team and I repeatedly tried to give them the emails. We confirmed the emails were sent to the reporter and their fact checker before the article came out,” Minhaj said. “They knew my rejection was due to race. I confirmed it on the record and provided corroborating evidence. And yet they misled readers by excluding all of that and splicing two different quotes together to leave you thinking that I made up a racist incident.”

“Bethany” also never had her identity revealed as a result of Minhaj’s act. He presents screenshots of friendly emails and texts between himself and Bethany. In one, Minhaj instructs her to delete an old tweet which could potentially expose her identity.

There’s also a passage in Malone’s article which details an encounter Bethany and her husband had with Minhaj at one of his shows. Without using any direct quotes from Bethany, The New Yorker reports that she felt Minhaj invited her to the show to humiliate her. (In what way is not made clear.) Minhaj reveals that he didn’t invite the couple to the show—Bethany emailed him a heads-up after already getting tickets—and reported no one left feeling humiliated.

Minhaj says his liberties, which he refers to as “scenes” throughout the video, are par for the course in stand-up comedy, where aspects or kernels of reality are written into crowd-pleasing anecdotes. “When I am storytelling, every beat has to do multiple things in a funny and impactful way,” he told viewers of his process.

He specifies that his role as an on-stage storyteller carries different expectations than his work as a political “infotainment” host on shows like Patriot Act and The Daily Show.

“I thought I had two different expectations built into my work: my work as a storytelling comedian and my work as a political comedian, where facts always come first,” he says. “That is why the fact-checking on Patriot Act was extremely rigorous. The fact-checking in my congressional testimony, deeply rigorous…But in my work as a storytelling comedian, I assumed the lines between truth and fiction were allowed to be a bit more blurry.”

Minhaj ends his statement by noting: “Someone genuinely curious about truth in stand-up wouldn’t just fact check my specials. They would fact check a bunch of specials,” he reasoned. “They would establish a control group, a baseline, to see how far outside the bounds I was in relation to others. They wouldn’t just cherry pick a few stories.”

The report is said to have caused Comedy Central to "widen" its search for a permanent replacement for Trevor Noah as host of the The Daily Show, which Minhaj was widely considered to be a front-runner for. 

In a statement provided to Men's Journal, a spokesperson for The New Yorker stood by its original story and said Minhaj's video underscored the points it made.

"Hasan Minhaj confirms in this video that he selectively presents information and embellishes to make a point: exactly what we reported. Our piece, which includes Minhaj’s perspective at length, was carefully reported and fact-checked. It is based on interviews with more than twenty people, including former Patriot Act and Daily Show staffers; members of Minhaj’s security team; and people who have been the subject of his standup 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."