In the digital age, one joke has become a threadbare cliché: “It’s on the internet, so it must be true.” However, recent investigations into supposedly true stories have revealed that readers should have been practicing wary skepticism long before the internet democratized the dissemination of information. For example, in April 2021 we learned that America’s sweetheart conman Frank Abagnale lied to the whole world with his 1980 memoir “Catch Me If You Can,” which was turned into the hit 2002 film of the same name.

But while we can all let Abagnale off the hook for fooling us all (the movie is simply too fun to be angry with him), other similar hoaxes are not as forgivable. Take the case of Belgian author Misha Defonseca. According to The Daily Beast, her daring tale of survival during the Holocaust, which she told in her 1997 book “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” was all an outrageous fiction (of which readers really should have been more skeptical of from the get-go). In her book, Defonseca — whose real name is Monique de Wael — claimed that she set out to find her parents after they were taken by Nazis when she was 7 years old. She wrote that she survived on bugs and offal during her alleged 1,900-mile journey. She claimed to have killed a Nazi soldier trying to rape a young girl. Eventually, she somehow pulled a Mowgli and was “adopted” by a pack of wolves. If her story sounds too wild to be true, that’s because it absolutely was.

Discredited writer Misha Fonseca now lives as a social pariah

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