For Shrinking Fiction fans who have been following reports from my penpal Sharon Sergeant, forensic genealogist, on the Misha Defonseca fraudulent memoir, Surviving With Wolves, here is Sharon's latest report. She covers developments in the case in which the author of a bogus memoir, Misha Defonseca, sues her publisher for inadequately promoting a fraudulent memoir.
"Judge Timothy Feeley, the 28th August 2008 hearing judge, was unprepared to really examine the 2001 case in any detail. Particularly the issue of statute of limitations involving fraud upon the court and contamination of the entire proceedings. The court belived that Misha and her ghost writer were telling the truth.There were other important issues of discussion that relate to relevance and truth. First, Judge Feeley questioned whether it mattered that Misha's Holocaust story was untrue."Is it important that it was a work of fiction or a memoir?" Feeley asked at one point during the hearing. "I have trouble seeing how this new information changes the extent of the wrong found to be inflicted,"said Feeley. The judge thought that the ghost writer's lawyer's tangent into childhood traumas was not a relevant analogy, but at the same time time was still questioning whether the truth of Misha's story was relevant.
There was much discussion about how the market value of damages was determined based on the truth of Misha's Holocaust story. Never directly addressing the impact of Misha's lack of truthfulness in any part of the proceedings. There was no real discussion by the judge yet about whether it matters if Defonseca was lying or delusional, ie knowing fraud versus other explanations. Only the relevance of the book being a true story or not. So while the judge's question about the truth of the published story seems to be focused on the market value of the book, perhaps based upon the size of the putative award, he may be asking about the idea that even if Defonseca is a fraud, is that technically relevant to whether the court decided that Daniel, the American publisher, was a fraud."
- Sharon Sergeant.
Thanks again to Sharon for keeping us posted. This case interests me on several fronts: the budding science of forensic genealogy, the impact on the publishing industry of fraudulent memoir as an author path to literary notoriety/success and What about the Truth?"
Finally, here is a picture of Misha Defonseca for your consideration. Using Emotional Anatomy and character body types from our earlier Shrinking Fiction discussions and SCWC workshops, is there anything about Misha's body type that remotely connects to her falsifying a memoir?
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