Johann Hari

Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a British-Swiss writer and journalist who wrote for The Independent and The Huffington Post.

In 2000, Hari was joint winner of The Times Student News Journalist of the Year award for his work on the Cambridge student newspaper, Varsity.

Hari graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 2001 with a double first in social and political sciences.

Hari is gay.

He wrote an article claiming he had sex with men who were members of homophobic far-right and Islamist groups, stating that with drugs and "a lot of flattery" he "coaxed" a nineteen year old Muslim into "wild gay sex".

After university, he joined the New Statesman, where he worked between 2001 and 2003, and then wrote two columns a week for The Independent.

A play by Hari, Going Down in History, was performed at the Garage Theatre in Edinburgh, and his book God Save the Queen? was published by Icon Books in 2002.

Hari supported the Iraq War.

At the 2003 Press Gazette Awards, he won Young Journalist of the Year.

In 2005, Hari wrote an article in The Independent entitled "Pinter does not deserve the Nobel Prize", arguing that Harold Pinter, due to a misguided and misinformed anti-imperialist and anti-war stance, should not have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Pinter's official, authorised biographer, Michael Billington, commented that Hari "dismissed (Pinter's) Lecture in advance [of its broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK] as a 'rant' and falsely claimed that Pinter would have refused to resist Hitler."

In addition to being a columnist for The Independent, Hari's work also appeared in The Huffington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, El País, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Haaretz, and he reported from locations around the world, such as Congo and Venezuela.

He appeared regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme The Review Show and was a book critic for Slate.

The Media Standards Trust instructed the Council of the Orwell Prize, who had given their 2008 prize to Hari, to examine the allegations.

The Council concluded that "the article contained inaccuracies and conflated different parts of someone else's story" and did not meet the standards of Orwell Prize-winning journalism.

Hari returned the prize, though he did not return the prize money of £2,000.

He later offered to repay the sum, but Political Quarterly, which had paid the prize money, instead invited him to make a donation to English PEN, of which George Orwell had been a member.

Hari arranged with English PEN to make a donation equal to the value of the prize, to be paid in installments when he returned to work at The Independent, but he did not return to work there.

In addition to plagiarism, Hari was found to have fabricated elements of stories.

In one of the stories for which he won the Orwell Prize, he reported on atrocities in the Central African Republic, claiming that French soldiers told him that "Children would bring us the severed heads of their parents and scream for help, but our orders were not to help them."

However, an NGO worker who translated for Hari said that the quotation was invented and that Hari exaggerated the extent of the devastation in the CAR.

In his apology after his plagiarism was exposed, Hari claimed that other staff of the NGO had supported his version of events.

In an article about military robots, Hari falsely claimed that the former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was attacked by a factory robot and was nearly killed.

Hari falsely claimed that a large globe erected for the Copenhagen climate summit was "covered with corporate logos" for McDonald's and Carlsberg, with "the Coke brand ... stamped over Africa".

Private Eye's Hackwatch column also suggested that he pretended to have used the drug ecstasy and misrepresented a two-week package tour in Iraq as a one-month research visit, in order to bolster support for the Iraq war by claiming that Iraqi civilians he spoke to were in favour of an invasion.

While Hari was working at the New Statesman, the magazine's deputy editor, Cristina Odone, doubted the authenticity of quotations in a story he wrote.

When she asked to see his notebooks, he stalled, then claimed to have lost them.

She also found out that Hari had been fired from a position at the Cambridge student newspaper for allegedly unethical behavior.

In 2009, he was named by The Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain.

For example, a 2009 interview with Afghan women's rights activist Malalai Joya included quotations from her book Raising My Voice in a manner that made them appear as if spoken directly to Hari.

A piece entitled “How Multiculturalism Is Betraying Women” that Hari submitted when entering the Orwell Prize was plagiarised from Der Spiegel.

Hari initially denied any wrongdoing, stating that the unattributed quotes were for clarification and did not present someone else's thoughts as his own.

However, he later said that his behaviour was "completely wrong" and that "when I interviewed people, I often presented things that had been said to other journalists or had been written in books as if they had been said to me, which was not truthful".

In 2011, Hari was suspended from The Independent and later resigned, after admitting to plagiarism and fabrications dating back to 2001 and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct.

He has since written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, and the effect of technology on attention spans.

Hari was born in Glasgow, Scotland to a Scottish mother and Swiss father, before his family relocated to London when he was an infant.

Hari states he was physically abused in his childhood while his father was away and his mother was ill.

He attended The John Lyon School, an independent school affiliated with Harrow, and then Woodhouse College, a state sixth form in Finchley.

In June 2011, bloggers at Deterritorial Support Group, as well as Yahoo! Ireland editor Brian Whelan, asserted that Hari had plagiarised material published in other interviews and writings by his interview subjects.

Hari was suspended for two months from The Independent and in January 2012, it was announced he was leaving the newspaper.