Minhaj often talks about his immigrant upbringing and the social alienation that sometimes came with being a racial minority in his home town. The central story of his first Netflix special, "Homecoming King," which was released in 2017, is about his crush on a friend, a white girl with whom he shared a stolen kiss and who accepted his invitation to prom but later reneged in a humiliating fashion; Minhaj showed up on her doorstep the night of the dance, only to see another boy putting a corsage on her wrist. Onstage, Minhaj says that his friend's parents didn't want their daughter to take pictures with a brown boy, because they were concerned about what their relatives might think. "I'd eaten off their plates," Minhaj says. "I'd kissed their daughter. I didn't know that people could be bigoted even as they were smiling at you."

But the woman disputed certain facts. She told me that she'd turned down Minhaj, who was then a close friend, in person, days before the dance. Minhaj acknowledged that this was correct, but he said that the two of them had long carried different understandings of her rejection. As a "brown kid in Davis, California," he said, he'd been conditioned to put his head down and "just take it, and I did." The "emotional truth" of the story he told onstage was resonant and justified the fabrication of details. "There are so many other kids who have had a similar sort of doorstep experience," he said.

The woman also said that she and her family had faced online threats and doxing for years because Minhaj had insufficiently disguised her identity, including the fact that she was engaged to an Indian American man. A source with knowledge of the production said that, during the show's Off Broadway run, Minhaj had used a real picture of the woman and her partner, with their faces blurred, projected behind him as he told the story.

The woman said that Minhaj had invited her and her husband to an Off Broadway performance. She had initially interpreted the invitation as an attempt to rekindle an old friendship, but she now believes the move was meant to humiliate her. Later, she said, when she confronted Minhaj about the online threats brought on by the Netflix special—"I spent years trying to get threads taken down," she told me—Minhaj shrugged off her concerns.

Now do an exposition on those frauds Riz and Nanjiani. The more they complain about racism and white people, the more guilty they are.