Four disappointing revelations about Hasan Minhaj’s “emotional truths”

In Minhaj’s 2022 Netflix standup special, “The King’s Jester” he tells the story of an FBI informant who infiltrated his family’s mosque in 2002. Minhaj paints the picture of an athletic white man named Brother Eric who converted to Islam to gain the trust of and embed himself in the Sacramento Muslim community. Minhaj supposedly had Brother Eric pegged as a fraud from the start and even told him a tale to take back to the FBI, which supposedly led Minhaj to be roughed up by the police against the hood of a car. But all of these claims were fake.

It turns out that Brother Eric was indeed an FBI informant in Muslim communities pretending to be a personal trainer. His real name was Craig Monteilh, and he told The New Yorker that Minhaj’s claims aren’t true. “I have no idea why he would do that,” said Monteilh, who was in prison in 2002, and didn’t begin to work for the FBI on counterterrorism measures until 2006. Furthermore, he said he had only worked in Southern California, not in the Sacramento area.

Another fabrication from Minhaj’s comedy is one about baby anthrax. After the comedian did a reported segment on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi and Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism — someone sent a letter to his home which was filled with white powder. He then claims the powder spilled on his young daughter and she was rushed to the hospital. While it turned out not to be anthrax, Minhaj claimed that the point was that he had received such a threat in the first place for his powerful work.

Except . . . Minhaj admitted to The New Yorker that his daughter had never been exposed to a white powder at all nor had she been hospitalized. But he insisted, “The punch line is worth the fictionalized premise.”