'Misha' Publisher Files to Overturn $33 Million Judgment
by Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 4/9/2008 2:13:00 PM
In the wake of Misha Defonseca’s public acknowledgement last month in Belgium’s Le Soir newspaper that Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust (1997), also known as Surviving With Wolves, is not true, the book’s original publisher Jane Daniel and her one-person Mt. Ivy Press in Gloucester, Mass., are seeking to overturn a 2001 $11 million judgment, (later tripled to $33 million) on the basis that the book is a hoax.
That judgment was the culmination of lawsuits brought by both Defonseca and co-author Vera Lee almost immediately after the book was published, which claimed that Daniel hid money earned from the book in an off-shore account and that she had inadequately promoted the book. As a result, Mt. Ivy ceased publishing and Daniel paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to both Lee and Defonseca. The book, which was a bestseller in Europe and was recently made into a film, was stripped of its Mt. Ivy Press copyright by the Court.
According to yesterday’s filing in Massachusetts Superior Court, the jury was poisoned against Daniel because of their sympathy for Defonseca’s sufferings during the Holocaust. The book chronicles Defonseca’s life at the time, when, as a seven-year-old child she traveled thousands of miles through the forests of Europe in search of her parents. The filing also notes that Daniel had no way to defend herself in 2001, because the technology wasn’t adequate to enable her to verify who Defonseca really was. The complaint states: “It was only with the advancement of the internet, and the corresponding availability of worldwide networking and information access that the truth regarding Defonseca’s true identity, and the corresponding magnitude of the hoax perpetrated by her in her memoir came to light.”
In fact, it wasn’t until last summer when Daniel began posting her work-in-progress about the publication of Misha, tentatively titled Bestseller!, on Blogger that the first chinks appeared in Defonseca’s story, originally hailed by The Sunday Telegraph as “an incredible memoir of wartime survival.” After reading the blog, forensic genealogist Sharon Sergeant was able to track down both Defonseca’s baptismal record and first grade registration, which Daniel posted. Using those documents journalist Marc Metdapenningen of Le Soir then located relatives of Defonseca who told him that the family was not Jewish and that Defonseca’s father had collaborated with the Gestapo.
Named in the suit are Defonseca, aka Monique de Wael, Vera Lee and law firm Edwards, Angell, Palmer, & Dodge (known as Palmer & Dodge at the time of the litigation). Among the charges are that “Defonseca, participated in a hoax of monumental magnitude, which she perpetrated upon, not only the plaintiffs, Daniel/Mt. Ivy Press, but upon the trial and appeals court, and public at large.” The suit also states that through the hoax, “Defonseca has, in essence, converted the funds of untold readers, who trusted, when the book was purchased, that it was what it purported to be--an autobiography. These readers have been duped and their money stolen by Defonseca.”
