Author of Fake Memoir Can Keep $32.4M Judgment, Court Rules
The author of a best-selling Holocaust memoir that was eventually determined to be a fake can keep the $32.4 million judgment she was awarded in an earlier case, along with a ghostwriter, a Massachusetts judge has ruled.
But that may not be the end of the story. A lawyer for the defendant, book publisher Jane Daniel, says she intends to appeal last week’s ruling upholding the 2001 jury verdict in a breach of contract case, reports the Associated Press.
The jury would not have awarded the money to author Misha Defonseca if they had known her 1997 Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years was fiction rather than factual, Daniel contends.
However, Middlesex Superior Court Judge Timothy Feeley dismissed Daniel’s suit, apparently on two alternative grounds:
First, she didn’t file it within a one-year statute of limitations, the newspaper says. And, second, the subject matter of the book wasn’t at issue in the contract matter, which focused on whether profits were fairly divided.
Says Daniel: “The poor, poor Holocaust survivor and the evil publisher who had victimized her—that’s how it was characterized in the trial, and that’s what’s being allowed to stand.”
As Defonseca has now admitted, the news agency notes, she not only didn’t live with wolves, kill a German soldier in self-defense or walk 3,000 miles across Europe searching for her family during the World War II era but, in fact, isn’t even Jewish.
