Hasan Minhaj response: Did the New Yorker really do him dirty? Explained.

When the New Yorker published staff writer Clare Malone’s exposé on comedian Hasan Minhaj in September—which brought to light, among other things, some alleged fabrications in his stand-up specials—fans and critics were shocked and disappointed. In his response, Minhaj accuses the New Yorker of implying that he fabricated the entire thing, and of insinuating that his “race wasn’t a factor” in the girl’s rejection of him. Minhaj castigates the New Yorker for Malone’s “long carried different understandings of her rejection” line, which he calls misleading; he provides audio tape of his longer quote, wherein he explains the “difference” was in the woman’s apparent lack of knowledge of how deeply the incident had hurt him. Minhaj accuses the New Yorker of being “more concerned” with the FBI informant than his intentions of spreading awareness for stories like Hayat’s. In that paragraph, Malone writes that Minhaj “drew a hard line between his hosting duties on Patriot Act and his stage work” in their conversation, specifically stating that he was adamant that “in Patriot Act, his comedic license took a back seat to the information being conveyed.” However, Malone soon poses the question of how “most people likely don’t parse which Hasan Minhaj they’re watching at a given moment.” So Minhaj’s approach is included in full in the New Yorker piece, although it’s true that splitting the final quote from the earlier, more exhaustive paragraph could be misleading to some.