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The Lies of Trauma Merchants Kat Rosenfield

Published

12 months ago

September 24, 2023

Hasan Minhaj won a Peabody in 2019 for his Netflix series Patriot Act. (Bryan Bedder via Getty Images)

My colleagues and I filed into the vice president’s office at the publishing house where I worked, crowding around a television that was turned to ABC. The year was 2005. The mood was giddy, as if we were about to witness a public execution—which, in a way, we were.

James Frey, author of the best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, had been exposed as a fraud. Oprah Winfrey, formerly his biggest champion, was about to confront him live on national television. And she was pissed.

“I’ve struggled with the idea of it,” Frey said, in response to a question about the famous, and then-allegedly fallacious, scene in his book in which he receives a root canal without anesthesia. Oprah snapped. “No,” she said, icily. “Not the idea of it. The lie of it.”

Frey, whose book was published in 2003, was the most notorious literary fabulist of the moment, but hardly the only one. The 2000s were rife with fabricators. There was Margaret Seltzer, who had lied about being a biracial gang member in South Central Los Angeles. There was J.T. Leroy, a trans sex worker, drug addict, and author of semi-autobiographical novels—who turned out to be the imaginary alter ego of a middle-aged woman named Laura Albert. There was Herman Rosenblat, whose Holocaust memoir Angel at the Fence was cancelled when it turned out that, though his story of surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp was true, the improbable tale of the little girl who saved his life by throwing apples over the camp’s barbed wire fence, and later became his wife, was not.

All very different narratives, and yet, with a common thread—one that at the time spurred a fiery debate about memoir as a genre, and the proliferation of what could only be described as trauma porn.

Memoir offers all the enticing horror of sexual abuse, of graphic violence, of watching a man strapped down and brutalized by a dentist—while offering the upright reader plausible deniability. He consumes these books not because he finds such things titillating, but because he cares. Audiences want to read about pain and suffering, abuse and exploitation; you were supposed to feel bad for the people who had written these books, while also feeling good about how bad you felt.

When Oprah angrily told James Frey that he had “betrayed millions of readers,” it was this crucial contract he was accused of violating. Because if these stories weren’t true, then the people who were thrilled by them weren’t empaths, but voyeurs.

Today, the collective horror at Frey’s deception feels like the product of a more innocent time, particularly when compared with the muted response to last week’s unmasking of his contemporary equivalent. Comedian and television personality Hasan Minhaj, an alumnus of The Daily Show, built his career on stories of the persecution he had faced as an Indian, Muslim son of immigrants in a post-9/11 America. But as outlined in a devastating report by New Yorker writer Clare Malone, his most popular material contained key omissions and barefaced lies.

The FBI informant who infiltrated Minhaj’s Muslim community and then reported his mosque to the authorities? Minhaj never met him. The hospitalization of Minhaj’s daughter after someone mailed him an envelope full of a white mystery powder that could have been anthrax? Never happened. And the high school ex-girlfriend who accepted Minhaj’s invitation to prom, only to jilt him on her doorstep for racist reasons while her new (white) date slipped a corsage on her wrist? She had actually turned down Minhaj several days earlier, and this doorstep moment—upon which Minhaj more or less built his career—was a complete fabrication.

Much like Frey, Minhaj’s popularity centered on his suffering. His work was understood to express the crude, unvarnished and sometimes darkly funny truth of what it is like to be a brown-skinned man in a racist America: white liberal audiences treated him as a sort of mascot for the oppressed, while the culturati lauded him for speaking truth to power. Here, as Slate writer Nitish Pahwa puts it, was “an Indian Muslim, hosting his own show, taking the country to task on his terms, terms that had long been absent from the white man–dominated industries of stand-up comedy and late-night TV.”

But things are a little more complicated when the fabricator is telling tales on the stage rather than the page. It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this—even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves. An essay from 2017 by screenwriter and stand-up David Misch, which tackles this very question, includes a prescient little frisson:

I agree that the idea of authenticity in a stand-up’s persona is bullshit, but subject matter is a different matter—specifically, when a comedian moves from personal observations to cultural critiques. Wouldn’t we feel betrayed if we found out that the political routines of. . . Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers (now) didn’t reflect their beliefs? Being Muslim-American is central to Hasan Minaj’s identity as a stand-up—wouldn’t we feel differently about him if it turned out he was Baptist?

Misch presents this as a rhetorical question, and it is—but only because of the kind of comedian Minhaj is, which is to say, the kind who is not particularly funny. Consider the top YouTube result from his Netflix special, Homecoming King, in which he talks about the harassment his family endured after 9/11. There are ripples of laughter here and there, but it’s only when he stops joking and starts preaching—“I have the audacity of equality!” he says—that the audience explodes like they’re at a tent revival.

Of course, this is as intended. Minhaj isn’t a make-you-laugh-till-your-face-hurts comedian; he’s a Daily Show guy, a pundit with a slightly-better-than-average sense of humor, but one that is smug rather than silly. His audience isn’t there to laugh so much as enjoy the sensation of moral authority with a wink and a titter. And while Minhaj’s material works well enough on television, onstage it translates to something that is less stand-up comedy and more performance memoir.

Here, Minhaj is following in the footsteps of performers such as Hari Kondabolu, John Oliver, Seth Myers, and of course, Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix special Nanette was more trauma porn that explicitly scolded its audience for showing up expecting to laugh. Critics at the time suggested that Gadsby had broken some final frontier, effectively severing the connection between comedy and jokes. Maybe laughter had had its moment; maybe what we needed from comedians now was some moral instruction in what isn’t funny. Maybe what we needed was to feel bad—and to feel good about how bad we felt.

Under this new contract, drawn up amid the creeping identitarianism of Trump-era art, it is not hard to see why someone like Minhaj might fall into the trap of not just monetizing his trauma, but fabricating it. It is what Jay Caspian Kang called “oppression fantasy,” writing that Minhaj’s fakery represents “another example of how oppression stories—in this case fabricated oppression porn—gets leveraged by upwardly mobile immigrants to mostly advance their careers.”

It is also a familiar dynamic to anyone who remembers the memoir hoaxes of 20 years ago; the type of audience who flocks to see Minhaj today is the same one that made James Frey a bestseller. There is nothing that white educated liberals love more than to slum it in a voyeuristic narrative of someone else’s suffering, all while congratulating themselves on being enlightened enough to appreciate it for the art it is. Inject a bit of racial guilt into the mix, and you’ll dine out for the rest of your life courtesy of the New Yorker tote bag class—at least until one of said magazine’s investigative reporters finds out you’re full of shit.

But today’s trauma merchants are ultimately better off than the hoax memoirists. The days in which audiences responded to lies like this with a sense of outrage and betrayal are over; if anything, the anger today is reserved for the person who interrupts a comfortable narrative with a bunch of pesky facts. Consider what happens, inevitably, whenever some bias-stroking outrage is exposed as a fraud—whether it’s Jussie Smollett, or kids identifying as cats, or a guy allegedly shrieking the N-word at a crowded sporting event. Instead of revising our prior beliefs, we look for ways in which being wrong only goes to show how right we were. So, this story wasn’t true? Ah, well: this country is so racist, or sexist, or full of sexually depraved weirdos who want to secretly turn every kid into a trans-cat, that it could have been true, and that’s just as bad.

Or, as Hasan Minhaj might put it, it doesn’t matter if the story is fake when it is “emotionally true”—which is to say, when it feels like something that could have happened. Needless to say, some people object to this, not least the woman who politely declined that prom invitation as a teenager: she and her family have been receiving death threats for years thanks to Minhaj’s fabrications, a fact about which the comedian is decidedly cavalier. Maybe this girl didn’t do what he described, he says, and maybe what he described wasn’t done to him—but it had certainly happened sometime, to someone, somewhere: “There are so many other kids who have had a similar sort of doorstep experience.”

No doubt this is true, and not just of kids like Minhaj; when I was 17, a more popular boy took me out on a date, then dropped me back at my house several hours later with the dire warning that I couldn’t tell anyone that we were seeing each other. He simply couldn’t risk the humiliation of his friends knowing he was interested in someone like me. His reasons for this had nothing to do with race and everything to do with high school social dynamics; if I were telling this story as part of a stand-up routine, perhaps I would have to find a way to make him an antisemite.

But despite the fact that the prom story is emotionally resonant with many a teenage experience, there is still something weird—even, dare I say, appropriative—about claiming to have been a victim of something that didn’t happen, let alone making a living off it. On this front, Minhaj has less in common with the comedian who embellishes a wacky story for laughs, and more in common with the TikToker who scammed her followers out of thousands of dollars to treat a cancer she didn’t have. Minhaj has been dining out for years on that doorstep moment. He published it as an essay in Vanity Fair. He’s spoken about it countless times with reporters, never presenting it as anything but a first-person experience. And while it has become a fixture of his comedy over the years, when Minhaj first debuted this material, it wasn’t actually in a stand-up routine, but at a storytelling competition called The Moth.

It is an interesting institution, The Moth: a sort of open mic night for anecdotes, a performance memoir showcase. It has just one rule: the story you tell on its stage has to be true.

This piece is reprinted with permission from UnHerd, where it originally appeared, and where Kat Rosenfield is a columnist. Follow her on Twitter at @katrosenfield.

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Learning from Oddballs K.L. Evans

Published

23 mins ago

September 20, 2024

K.L. Evans with her daughter, Ruby LaRocca, the winner of our first-ever high school essay contest. (Photo courtesy of the author)

At the end of August, we ran a special series on What School Didn’t Teach Us, in which Joe Nocera described his path into journalism and Julia the Intern explained why she wanted to try farming before taking up her place at Stanford. (You can catch up with it.)

In response to the series, we got a letter from K.L. Evans, who homeschooled her daughter Ruby LaRocca—otherwise known as the winner of our first-ever High School Essay Contest. Last year, Ruby wrote us a gorgeous Constitution for Teenage Happiness. Reading her mother’s letter—about what you can learn in school, if you have the right teacher—we now get how Ruby ended up so wise beyond her years.

The best students are the bad ones. That was my great discovery in school. I was not belligerent or idle, just a little deviant. Dreamy. I would dodge what I was supposed to be doing and work industriously on projects that were not asked for and would never have been assigned. (Bold, unwieldy affairs that required enormous effort and patience and drew tiny audiences.) I tortured and enjoyed myself. Pondered long and earnestly on how I should make use of my life. I met with many successes but of a kind so marginal they scanned as failures. People found me charming and ridiculous.

My favorite teachers were the same: unpredictable, untidy, gifted in a way that only a handful of people appreciated. They tended to be honest, and so uncertain about their own effectiveness. Both exacting and affable. Bound absurdly to the twin demands of scholarship and art. Never friendless, but often lonely. (I know because eventually I became one of them.) I found my teachers in old books, in novels and plays and films, and occasionally in real life. Some who I knew in person were just assigned to me, and I had the good sense to cling to them like a barnacle. Some wrote books that taught me how to think, and once in a while I would be brave enough to send a letter to one of these hardworking scholars, and the most generous of them would write back. Corresponding with lively intellectuals far beyond my limited circle of acquaintance was almost as exciting as coming to understand with profit those playful, dynamic, radical works of education sometimes called “classics.”

A classic is one of those rare, synoptic books around which a whole life can evolve, or which becomes deeper as one becomes deeper. That’s why classics have what Ezra Pound calls “a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.” They do not reinforce but challenge our habitual, settled ways of thinking—which is perhaps why so many people assiduously avoid reading them. As the playwright Alan Bennett jokes, “A classic is a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have read themselves.” Of course, school is not the only place one could find readers of such books, but in my experience, school was where you found them. (Even if on the perimeter, without a formal position.)

My point is that the experience of formal education missing from the Editors’ recent investigation into “What School Didn’t Teach You” is the one clung to by the most serious teachers and students: Those eccentrics and oddballs who associate school with the charged, productive space one person opens up for another. The philosopher Stanley Cavell said a teacher is any person who “shows one a way to do relevantly and fruitfully the thing one had almost given up hope of doing.” According to this view, “school” is where students find (only by looking) teachers (not all, not most, but a small, animated faction) game to ward off the stultifying atmosphere in which educators take up a mode of explanation premised on students’ inability—in which teaching assumes the form, “I must explain this to you, since you cannot understand it yourself.” Most people feel fondly about school in proportion to how much they practiced thinking, unraveling difficulties, for themselves.

Schooling as I experienced it and tried to re-create for my students felt less conventional, more bohemian than the kind of pre-professional training the contributors to your series rightly fled—for the farm, the newsroom, or the workshop. A very clever friend of mine (one of those brilliant, legendary, unemployed intellectuals happily occupying what John Ashbery calls the “category of oblivion which increasingly threatens any artist who dares to take his own way”) says that human genius is like grass breaking through concrete; it persists even in situations of institutional hostility. School is and ought to be the straining, daring green and the crushing pavement—minus which the grass ain’t so beautiful.

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Introducing the First Class of Free Press Fellows Maya Sulkin

Published

1 hour ago

September 20, 2024

Maya Sulkin is chief of staff at The Free Press. (via The Free Press)

When I joined The Free Press—then called Common Sense—as an intern in 2021, it was run out of a family group chat. Literally.

Texts about what story from the news should we commission mingled with what we should order for dinner, and who was picking up the baby. There was no office, no HR department, and inevitably we went with Thai.

I scored the job the way most Free Pressers do: a cold email. In mine, I wrote about losing friends, grades, and party invites because I was too stubborn—or perhaps too foolish—to censor myself on campus. I told Bari I’d be willing to sweep the floors.

Instead, in my first week on the job, I sat in on an interview with Kim Kardashian from my dorm room. It was the most fun I had in my four years at college in the Covid era. And not just because my personal hero was on the other side of the camera—Kim, not Bari—but because it was the first time in a long time I hadn’t felt alone.

Overnight, I was working with people who left their jobs at places like The New York Times and NPR and Vanity Fair because, like me, they no longer belonged in the places that they worked so hard to get to. They became the most valuable mentors any young person could imagine.

That summer I flew to California and became the first Free Press intern. It was. . . informal. My official interview was with Suzy on FaceTime. Early on I had to Uber a microphone from Andrew Sullivan’s house to Larry Summers’ for a podcast recording. I’ve taken out the trash and furnished an entire newsroom from Facebook Marketplace. I’ve traveled to Israel to cover the war in Gaza and to Palo Alto for an interview with Javier Milei.

We’ve buttoned things up a bit since I started. And we’ve grown. A lot.

I have watched that little family group chat—and an office that was Bari and Nellie’s kitchen table—grow into a full-fledged newsroom. We still think of ourselves as an island of misfit toys, but when I really look, I see a hotbed of journalistic talent, doing agenda-setting reporting. I see an 800,000-person strong community of engaged, freethinking subscribers from all over the world. And we’ve found young journalists who embody our values: honesty, curiosity, respect, hard work, independence, excellence, common sense, and a belief in the American project.

So today, we are thrilled to announce a new initiative: The Free Press Fellowship. It’s a two-year program for reporters and writers eager to pursue the kind of journalism that makes The Free Press live up to its name.

The 2024–2025 Free Press Fellows are:

Julia Steinberg (known far and wide as Julia the Intern) has been with The Free Press since her sophomore year of college. In those two years, she has answered all of your “Where I TGs,” testified before Congress, and reported on the ground at the DNC. As a rising senior at Stanford, she will serve as the editor of The Stanford Review.

Here’s Julia on her time at The Free Press: “This was my second summer at The Free Press. I chose to come back—and work part-time during the craziest school year I could imagine—because I was not treated with kid gloves. Interns are trusted to to pitch, report, and write stories, script podcasts, take on business projects, create videos, and so much more. (And yes, sometimes we make coffee.)”

Evan Gardner, a rising senior at Brown, has also been at The Free Press for two years. In that time, he spearheaded our Olympics coverage, traveled to Nashville to cover country music concerts, and installed Ethernet in our new New York offices. (Thank you, Evan!)

Here’s Evan: “I’ve learned how to follow an exciting idea from the chaos of my Notes app all the way to something worthy of the pages of The Free Press. My writing and my thinking have become more expansive, yet precise. Around the clock, there is never a dull moment with this lean but strong team, and there’s no place I’d rather be as we continue to bring you the history—and the madness—unfolding before us. I’ve never consumed this much Diet Coke in my life. I couldn’t be happier doing it.”

Elias Wachtel came to us this summer after finishing his junior year at Columbia, where he studies ancient Greek and classical political philosophy. He wrote about his time on the Appalachian trail and called for Gen Z to turn to national service. He commissioned freelance pieces, worked with editors, and contributed reporting to stories on West Virginia’s opioid settlement distribution and the psychological strain on elite gymnasts.

Here’s Elias: “The most remarkable thing about interning with The Free Press is that they really care about hearing from us. I was shocked when I first learned I’d be allowed to write and publish this summer—in what other internship is that even possible? Before I started working here, I had been a longtime reader of The Free Press. At first, I was almost scared to see what it was like behind the scenes, lest I uncover some hidden angle, some well-kept secret that would shatter my faith in the project. But the wonderful thing about The Free Press is that it’s just what it promises to be: a small team of fiercely independent, curious thinkers who want to bring you the truth, each and every day.”

Jonas Du became a Free Press intern through a Twitter DM he sent to Bari while reporting the Columbia campus protests back in May.

In his time at The Free Press, Jonas has responded to an Atlantic article that argued conservatives benefit from the hostile environment of liberal college campuses, written about why the “authentic” social media app BeReal faltered, and appeared on NewsNation to talk about what young voters want from Harris and Trump.

“When you’re part of a company that’s truly new and disruptive, you can feel it every day. That’s why working at The Free Press this summer has been the best internship experience I could have wished for. After only a few months at The Free Press, it’s hard to imagine working for the legacy media. Every day, I see the real-world impact that reporters, editors, and producers sitting in the same room as me have on the national conversation. To be a part of that team, especially as a 21-year-old, is an opportunity I am incredibly grateful for.”

Last but not least, we are thrilled to welcome Danielle Shapiro.

Danielle is currently a senior at Princeton University, where she studies political theory and history. She is the president emeritus of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, which is committed to truth-seeking and academic freedom. Shapiro’s summer internships, at both Tablet magazine and The Wall Street Journal opinion page, have cemented her desire to pursue a career in journalism. “As someone who has been following The Free Press since its inception, I am so excited to join a growing team of motivated and thoughtful writers,” she said.

You’ll notice that the Free Press Fellows this year are all college seniors. You need not be a college student—or have ever gone to college—to apply to the next cohort. Indeed, we are especially keen to consider college-aged applicants from nontraditional or unconventional backgrounds.

If that sounds like you, please apply here to be considered for The Free Press Fellowship program for 2025–2026.

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