Kenna regularly talks about his time in the military and
MSAI prominently describes itself as “veteran-run” on its website. On
the same podcast he said he joined the Army in the same week as 9/11,
and in our interview he described it as the “catalyst” for enlisting,
but later said he had joined in 2000. Elsewhere, including on his own
LinkedIn profile, he says he joined in 1999 – two years before the
attack on the World Trade Center.

Although he did serve in the army, he has variously claimed
it was for seven, eight and ten years, before he says he was injured by
an improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq and left in a coma for
eight weeks. “I was in a convoy, and the people next to me, the people
behind me, no one else survived,” he said in a Pride month presentation
for the software company Ataccama. When he recovered, he says he left
the Army, came out as gay and built a career in advertising.

The Walter Mitty Hunters’ Club – a group of veterans that
investigates allegations of stolen valour – said it had received several
responses from other veterans who knew Kenna and didn’t recall such an
incident.

Kenna, who has the 18 Signal Regiment’s logo, a sword
overlaid with three lightning bolts, tattooed on his hand, said in our
interview that his near-death experience happened in 2004. There were
three incidents in Iraq in 2004 in which more than one British
serviceperson was killed, according to government records.

We repeatedly asked Kenna for further details that would
allow us to corroborate the IED incident and he didn’t provide any.
However, he did send a statement from a veteran who says he served
alongside him from 2005 – the year after Kenna told us he was seriously
injured. The statement does not mention the IED incident.

When we queried the discrepancy, MSAI’s VP of
infrastructure, Dean Evans, who is also Kenna’s romantic partner, told
us that the date given in the interview was likely wrong due to recall
problems caused by Kenna’s epilepsy, and that he would not be engaging
with questions “focusing on increasingly granular detail”.