Free Republic

'Wolf woman' invents Holocaust survival tale By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels  Last Updated: 4:14pm GMT 29/02/2008     A woman's best-selling account of how she lost her parents to the Holocaust and survived by living with wolves in the forests of Europe has been exposed as a fabrication.   Mrs Defonseca's book became a runaway bestseller   "Surviving with Wolves", first published 11 years ago, has been translated into 18 languages and was recently turned into a film. But in a statement issued by her lawyers, Misha Defonseca, who was born Monique De Wael, confessed that while her parents, members...

Memoir of abused girl is a fake, says new investigation Her memoir of a childhood destroyed by cruelty and fear was a publishing phenomenon. In fact, as this investigation reveals, Kathy O'Beirne had cynically made it all up... Within her bestselling memoir, a harrowing tale of childhood brutality and sexual abuse, Kathy O'Beirne claims: "The Devil himself could not have dreamed up a better hell." And, at first glance, one would have to agree. Ms O'Beirne, who was brought up just outside Dublin, reveals in lurid detail the years she spent as a slave to sadistic nuns in the notorious...

Former Chapel Hill author Nasdijj won national acclaim writing memoirs about his brutal childhood as a Navajo Indian in the Southwest and as a father to two adopted sons who died of AIDS and fetal alcohol syndrome. In truth, he was Timothy P. Barrus, a man of Scandinavian descent who grew up in a solidly middle-class neighborhood of Lansing, Mich., and had a career writing gay pornography, according to public records and several people who know Barrus. The likelihood that Barrus had fabricated his past -- and parlayed the fiction into three successful nonfiction books -- was first raised Wednesday...