Judge rejects suit against woman who fabricated Holocaust memoir

[revision]

10/10/2008

Judge rejects suit against woman who fabricated Holocaust memoir

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1027918.html

A woman who admitted fabricating a best-selling memoir about surviving the Holocaust as a child by living with wolves has won a court battle with her former publisher.

Misha Defonseca's 1997 book, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, was translated into 18 languages, made into a feature film in France, and drew interest from the Walt Disney Co. and Oprah Winfrey.

After Defonseca admitted earlier this year that she had made up the story, her former publisher, Jane Daniel, sued to try to overturn a $32.4 million court judgment Defonseca and her ghost writer, Vera Lee, won against her in an earlier fight over profits. Daniel argued that because the story was false, Defonseca perpetrated a hoax on the trial judge and the jury.

But this week, Middlesex Superior Court Judge Timothy Feeley threw out Daniel's lawsuit because she did not file it within a one-year statute of
limitations.

The judge said that the truth of the memoire was not an issue in the earlier court battle between Defonseca and Daniel. Instead, the case was about claims of violations of the contract between the authors and the publisher, Feeley said.

Defonseca's fraud, misrepresentations, and misconduct did not go to the heart of the case, he said in his written ruling, filed Tuesday.

Daniel said the jury at the 2001 trial would not have issued a verdict against her if they had known that Defonseca made up the story.

Defonseca, 71, acknowledged in February that she never lived with wolves to escape the Nazis, never killed a German soldier in self-defense, never walked 5,000 kilometers across Europe in search of her parents - and
that she is not even Jewish.

"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," Daniel said Thursday.

"This decision is discounting that that had an all-pervasive effect on the outcome of the trial," she said.

Neither Defonseca or Lee could immediately be reached for comment Thursday.

In earlier interviews, Defonseca and Lee said the truth of the 1997 book had no bearing on the jury's finding that Daniel cheated them out of profits.

Defonseca and Lee later sued Daniel for breach of contract. In 2001, a Middlesex District Court jury found that Daniel had failed to promote the book as promised and had hidden profits. The jury awarded Defonseca $7.5 million and Lee $3.3 million, but those amounts were later tripled by a judge who found Daniel and her small publishing company, Mt. Ivy Press, had misled both women and tried to claim royalties herself by rewriting the book.