Hasan Minhaj Clarifies Admission He Fabricated Suspected Anthrax Attack, Other Anecdotes: ‘Based On Events That Happened To Me’

etcanada.com:

A new profile on comedian Hasan Minhaj alleges that many anecdotes he recounted in his various comedy specials and Netflix series, “Patriot Act” — with Minaj seemingly acknowledging that to be the case.

In the New Yorker piece, writer Clare Malone notes that while comedians will offer exaggerate an event for comedic impact, she runs through several stories Minhaj used that simply never happened.

Among these, Malone writes, were a story about an FBI informant who had infiltrated he mosque he and his family attended and how he later saw him placed under arrest on television.

Another involved a story Minhaj recounted about an envelope sent to his home that contained white powder, which spilled on his young daughter, which he’d feared was anthrax but turned out to be harmless. READ MORE: Hasan Minhaj Testifies Before Congress About Student Debt Crisis That’s Seeing Fans Beg Taylor Swift To Pay Off Their Loans In her investigation, however, Malone spoke with “Patriot Act” staffers and others — including the FBI informant, Craig Monteilh, who insisted he’d never been to that mosque and had never met Minhaj. “I have no idea why he would do that,” Monteilh told Malone, confirming none of what Minaj described had happened. “When we met on a recent afternoon, at a comedy club in the West Village, Minhaj acknowledged, for the first time, that many of the anecdotes he related in his Netflix specials were untrue,” she wrote.