Throughout the article, it's stated that Hanna was victim to many violations such as being hung from a rod and beaten with a stick, raped near a dead tree trunk, and having electric shock applied to her vagina.

Anwar was a 30-year old Indian wood carver who was born to immigrants from the British Raj, and first encountered Hanna after she had come in to his shop asking him to repair a box.

They stayed in a room near the office of Paul Bremer and lived in the palace for three months, before relocating to northern California in the western United States.

[4] [3] Following Hanna's relocation to the United States, her case was given top priority by Bernard Kerik, the former interior minister for the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Paul Bremer requested humanitarian parole for her.

[6] Sara Solovitch, a journalist based in California, became interested in the story and met with Hanna for a series of interviews, as she intended to write a book about her life.

After their first meeting, however, Solovitch began to have doubts about Hanna's stories, primarily due to her insistence that she attended Oxford from 1982-1984 despite her poor English.

Many details about Hanna, such as her spending habits and her work with charities, had also caused her to be alienated from many of the Iraqi emigres and other people in California she had met.

Writing from Dubai, Youssef Ibrahim, former columnist for the Washington Post, believed that those in the Coalition Government were smart enough to know that Hanna's story hadn't been true, and that the controversy surrounding it negated Iraqis in the post-Saddam era to feeling manipulated and abused.