School girl prostitute's memoir full of fabrications

A girl made famous by her story of being forced into prostitution at age 12 may have made most of it up, a new book reveals.

Maria Mosterd is probably the Netherlands' most famous victim of what is, euphemistically, called a 'loverboy'. When she was a 12-year-old school girl, Mosterd, now 19, fell for a boy who then forced her into prostitution. Or at least that is the story she told in her bestseller Real men don't eat cheese (2008). After the huge success of the book, she and her mother, Lucie Mosterd, who also wrote a book about the experience, sued Maria's school for 76,000 euros in damages. The Mosterds claimed the school should have informed Maria's mother that her daughter was skipping classes.

Crime reporter Hendrik Jan Korterink had been following the case with curiosity, but it wasn't until a regular visitor to his website alerted him to a discrepancy that he really began to investigate it. Wasn't it weird, the reader asked, that they sued the school, but never pressed charges against the pimp responsible for her four years of misery?

Not present at gang rape

Maria also appeared on television telling unlikely stories. She said she had made thousands of euros a day and that police officers and other dignitaries were involved her crimes. In 2009, the Mosterds lost the case against the school because records showed Maria had hardly missed any classes.

This triggered the journalist to step up his investigation. He tracked down Manou, whom Maria claims was her pimp, and spoke to Maria's father and her friends in an attempt to establish the truth.

In his book about the case, titled Real men do eat cheese, Korterink shows that much of Maria's book is false. She did not lose her virginity to Manou at age 12. In fact, she never had sex with her alleged loverboy. It seems equally unlikely he forced her to prostitute herself. Despite Maria's claim to the contrary, Manou wasn't present at a gang rape that is described in her book. Two of Maria's girlfriends, Nikki and Bernice, claim she almost never skipped school, and was known to make up stories.

Lying or exaggerating?

Korterink compares her case to a number of other 'true stories'. He mentions Maria Monk, a Canadian nun who said she was sexually abused in a convent; Norma Khouri, who wrote Forbidden Love about honour killing in Jordan, a book her publisher labelled non-fiction but turned out to be a hoax; and the Dutch case of Jolanda, a woman who wrote a book describing how she was sadistically abused in Satanic rituals by members of her own family.

All three wrongly appropriated suffering, attracted (global) press attention, and became icons of particular injustices. Korterink argues that Mosterd's story fits into a tradition of "fully or partly fabricated stories presented as truth". Though he claims these are mainly published by women, however, one of the most famous cases is that of James Frey, the American who wrote A million little pieces, a memoir about his drug and alcohol addiction, and appeared on nearly every talk-show to discuss it at length. Today, Frey is known as 'the man who conned Oprah'. His book wasn't complete fiction, but he fabricated much of it.

Reading Korterink's expose’ convinces the reader Mosterd's story is untrue, but no one knows which parts are real and which are false. Was it all a lie, or was she just grossly exaggerating? Unfortunately Korterink's book is too messy to make this clear. He has produced a cluttered collection of chronological information without bothering to distinguish between major and minor issues. He focuses on the fact it wasn't raining on a certain day that is rainy in Mosterd's book and he has printed excerpts from her friends' diaries that are not necessarily more true than Maria's account. It appears that Korterink wanted to pre-empt accusations he was trying to exploit the hype surrounding the Mosterds for personal gain by writing a less gripping account, but the book is poorer for it.

Serious accusations

Going back to Maria's book after reading Korterink is amusing. On the cover it says, "Maria is twelve and she longs for a more exciting life," and "Six years later, she writes this gripping account". Her publisher, Chris ten Kate, says he never claimed her book was "the truth", he just said it was "authentic".

He may mince words by calling it "her subjective truth", but Mosterd's accusations of murder, pimping, rape and running a criminal organisation are too serious to fall back on semantics. James Frey may have lied about his own misery; Mosterd accuses others of serious crimes.

In addition, a look at Mosterd's personal website shows she couldn't write a proper sentence if her life depended on it. One, or several, editors must have helped her put her account on paper and render it fit for publication. The question is, what happened in the course of that process? The publisher would be well advised to be open about this, rather than hide behind the term ’subjective truth’.

Fact checking

In an interview, Ten Kate said it is impossible for a publisher to check all the stories that are offered to him as non-fiction. He has a point: victim-narratives such as that of Waris Dirie in Desert Flower have been published without all the facts about her life being checked.

In the case of Frey, readers demanded their money back from the publisher because they felt deceived. (Semi-) fictional or not, it would be nice if the Mosterds and their publisher made a royal gesture towards true victims of sexual exploitation and donated part of the fortune they made from their books to organisations that help protect girls from real sexual violence.