Kenna regularly talks about his time in the military and
\nMSAI prominently describes itself as \u201cveteran-run\u201d on its website. On
\nthe same podcast he said he joined the Army in the same week as 9\/11,
\nand in our interview he described it as the \u201ccatalyst\u201d for enlisting,
\nbut later said he had joined in 2000. Elsewhere, including on his own
\nLinkedIn profile, he says he joined in 1999 \u2013 two years before the
\nattack on the World Trade Center. <\/p>\n
Although he did serve in the army, he has variously claimed
\n it was for seven, eight and ten years, before he says he was injured by
\n an improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq and left in a coma for
\neight weeks. \u201cI was in a convoy, and the people next to me, the people
\nbehind me, no one else survived,\u201d he said in a Pride month presentation
\nfor the software company Ataccama. When he recovered, he says he left
\nthe Army, came out as gay and built a career in advertising.<\/p>\n
The Walter Mitty Hunters\u2019 Club \u2013 a group of veterans that
\ninvestigates allegations of stolen valour \u2013 said it had received several
\n responses from other veterans who knew Kenna and didn\u2019t recall such an
\nincident. <\/p>\n
Kenna, who has the 18 Signal Regiment\u2019s logo, a sword
\noverlaid with three lightning bolts, tattooed on his hand, said in our
\ninterview that his near-death experience happened in 2004. There were
\nthree incidents in Iraq in 2004 in which more than one British
\nserviceperson was killed, according to government records. <\/p>\n
We repeatedly asked Kenna for further details that would
\nallow us to corroborate the IED incident and he didn\u2019t provide any.
\nHowever, he did send a statement from a veteran who says he served
\nalongside him from 2005 \u2013 the year after Kenna told us he was seriously
\ninjured. The statement does not mention the IED incident.<\/p>\n
When we queried the discrepancy, MSAI\u2019s VP of
\ninfrastructure, Dean Evans, who is also Kenna\u2019s romantic partner, told
\nus that the date given in the interview was likely wrong due to recall
\nproblems caused by Kenna\u2019s epilepsy, and that he would not be engaging
\nwith questions \u201cfocusing on increasingly granular detail\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kenna regularly talks about his time in the military and MSAI prominently describes itself as \u201cveteran-run\u201d on its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,3561,111,139,69,145,56738],"class_list":{"0":"post-374542","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-fraud","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-workers-rights"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}