Writer loses $22.5m case for lying about the Holocaust

A woman who published a story about her life during World War II, now has to pay her publisher a staggering $22.5 million after her true story during those times surfaced.

Misha Defonseca published, in 1995, the book ‘Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years’, where she recounters her life as a seven-year-old. After her parents are arrested by the Nazis, the girl sets out on a quest to find them, crossing thousands of miles, killing a Nazi, skinning and eating rabbits and living with a pack of wolves.

Defonseca had sued her publisher earlier for ‘highly improper representations and activities’ and won the dispute, settling with $32.4 million.

But Jane Daniel, her publisher, committed herself to restoring the truth and eventually found out that Misha Defonseca was actually born Monica Ernestine Josephine De Wael, and that she had spent the years during the war in Brussels, with her grandparents. Moreover, the woman is not even Jewish.

As a result, the court ruled in Daniel’s favor and now Defonseca has to pay her former publisher $22.5 million. She tried to defend herself by saying that she truly believed the story while she wrote it and that, in addition, she had ‘always felt Jewish.’