by Samuel Rubinstein, UnHerd
Jason Arday’s death should not be weaponised
Marie Sophie Hingst was a promising young woman. Born in Germany, she received a doctorate in history from Trinity College Dublin. Her blog, “Read On, My Dear, Read On”, detailed the history of her own family. Several of her relatives had been murdered in the Holocaust, but her grandparents survived. She wrenchingly described how every year, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, they would sit in the darkness, waiting for all those relatives — 22, to be exact — who never came home. She kept in her pocket the yellow star which her grandmother had worn at Auschwitz. Hingst’s family was also blighted by a more recent tragedy: her mother, Rachel, had committed suicide. Hingst herself, however, led an altruistic life. She spent some time working at a hospital in an Indian slum. In Germany she ran sex education classes for Syrian refugees. She was thoughtful, sensitive, and interesting. People wanted to hear her story, and she enjoyed telling it.
There was just one problem. None of it was true. She never worked in an Indian slum or as a sex educator. She was not Jewish. None of her relatives died in the Holocaust. She had conjured up 22 Holocaust victims out of thin air, giving them Jewish-sounding names, and depositing falsified information about them at Yad Vashem. “Rachel” didn’t exist. “My daughter has many realities,” her real, living mother explained to a journalist. “I only have access to one.”
Hingst had spent years weaving a web of lies. Readers of her blog gradually began to notice small inconsistencies. Doubts started to grow. In 2019, an exposé in Der Spiegel took a wrecking ball to the whole edifice that she had carefully built up. A month later she killed herself. She was 31.
Sophie Hingst did not deserve to die. Neither did Jason Arday. We all know the mythology that now attaches to the former Cambridge professor, found dead at his home on Friday: the plagiarism, the marathons, the nonverbal autism, the brain tumour, the illiteracy, the armed intruder, the pig’s head. But beneath it all — if it needs to be said — was a man, a father, whose death marks a horrible end to a sorry tale.
Already the blame game has begun.
Read also: Jason Arday’s death is no reason to censor the media by Mary Harrington