A shameless Holocaust fraudster must fork over the $22.5 million she made from penning a book of her completely fabricated tales of World War II survival, a court ruled.
Massachusetts resident Misha Defonseca, 76, had previously admitted to completely inventing her 1997 best-seller “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years.”
But before the scam was exposed, she and ghostwriter Vera Lee won a $32.4 million judgment against publisher Mt. Ivy Press and company founder Jane Daniel in 1998 for breach of contract for hiding profits from the author.
That civil suit, however, pushed Daniel, journalists and forensic genealogists to check out Misha’s wild tale of survival — which all turned out to be fake.
Defonseca’s cut of the $32.4 million judgment was $22.5 million, and a Massachusetts court found she committed fraud and set aside the earlier verdict against the publishers.
Appeals court Judge Marc Kantrowitz penned what he called the “third, and hopefully the last” opinion in the case two weeks ago, affirming the lower court’s order for Defonseca to pay up, according to The Daily Mail.
In her book, Defonseca recounted how she trekked across snowy Europe, accompanied by wolves, and fatally stabbed a Nazi would-be rapist — all while she was between the ages of 7 and 11.
It turned out that Defonseca isn’t even Jewish and was enrolled in a Brussels school during World War II.
Defonseca rationalized that her parents’ arrest, for assisting the anti-Nazi resistance, led her to “feel Jewish.”
Daniel talked Defonseca into writing the book after hearing her recount the fantastic tales at a Massachusetts synagogue.
After telling the highly detailed, sensational lies for so many years, Defonseca said, she “found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination.”
“Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” has been printed in 18 languages and was made into a French feature film.