The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies Ever Published as Non-Fiction

5 A Million Little Pieces

The Book:

In 2003, author James Frey published a "memoir" about his life as a total unrepentant addict, alcoholic, criminal and all-around bad-ass motherfucker. So bad-ass, in fact, he has a tattoo on his forearm that says "FTBSITTTD," which allegedly stands for "Fuck The Bullshit, It's Time To Throw Down."

His book describes one fucked up incident after another. How he'd been arrested 11 times before he reached the age of 19. How he was investigated by the FBI for his massive drug-running empire but was never caught. How, drunk and high on crack, he nearly ran down a cop in Ohio. Then he took on said cop's backup, almost won and, instead, wound up in the slammer.

The Bullshit:

In reality, of course, Jimmy Frey never did any of those things. Oh, there's a microscopic grain of truth to some of it. He did not run down a cop, but he did blatantly park illegally near one, was busted for driving under the influence and having an open beer in the car with him, and spent about five whole hours in jail before a buddy ponied up a few hundred dollars in bail.

The cop he "almost ran down" did call for back up, but that was because he was a foot patrolman and didn't have a car to transport the reportedly "polite and cooperative" Mr. Frey to the Big House. You can guess how much truth there was in his claim to being a Tony Montana-esque drug kingpin.

Now, normally, this level of horseshit is reserved for the dumb fucker you meet in a bar who turns his routine traffic stop into the finale of Bonnie and Clyde. You know it's crap, but you play along because either A) The story is at least entertaining; B) The guy's so hammered you're bound to get into a "Oh yeah? YOU CALLIN' ME A LIAR, MOTHERFUCKER?" confrontation; or C) You just don't care enough to call the dude on his bullshit.

But what makes Mr. Frey's deceit so monumental is that he spun it into a best-selling novel and managed to con the famously gullible Oprah Winfrey. When Oprah slapped her "Book Club" sticker on this pile of bullshit wrapped in a hardcover and dustjacket, it spent weeks and weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.

The Crash:

The Smoking Gun found that not only were his stories of drug running and cop smooshing bullshit, but that he had inexplicably written himself into the tragic auto vs. locomotive death of three teens in his hometown of St. Joseph, Michigan.

Oprah, Valkyrie of wounded dignity that she was, brought Frey and his publisher back onto her show. She reduced Frey to a stammering six-year-old caught with his hand in the cookie jar and forced his publisher to admit that she never really got around to checking the veracity of Frey's claims 'cause, you know, he seemed so trustworthy. For an admitted drunk, junkie and criminal, that is.

4 Love and Consequences

The Book:

Our second entry in the "lame-ass white kid wants to be a stone-cold criminal" category is Love and Consequences penned under the nom de bullshit "Margaret B. Jones."

In this fauxmoir, "Jones" claims she is a half American Indian/half white foster kid growing up in the baddest parts of South Central Los Angeles, a world renowned war zone. She details her life with her foster mother, "Big Mom," her various foster brothers and sisters (many of whom die in violent and tragic ways), her experiences as a drug runner for the infamous Bloods gang at the age of 13 and cooking up some crack cocaine to pay the water bill at the age of 16.

The Bullshit:

"Jones" is actually Margaret Seltzer: an all white, upper-middle class girl who grew up in the oh-so-dangerous, predominantly white, San Fernando Valley suburb of Sherman Oaks. That's right kids, the killer drug running chick is actually a true-bred "Valley Girl."

How did Seltzer manage to get away with this crap before her own family sold her down the river? Through the totally convincing use of street slang, yo. For instance, she would spell words with a "k" instead of a "c". What, you didn't know gang folk did that? In her own words:

"... I want people to understand how deep-seated the hatred really is between CRIPs and Bloods. CRIPs celebrate C-days rather than B-days (birthdays) and Bloods smoke bigarettes not cigarettes. The hate is so deep that, as a Blood, you automatically change the spelling in words with a c in them."

That's... plausible. Right?

The Crash:

Poor Seltzer didn't get the chances that Frey did, such as scamming Oprah on national television. No, before her book tour got started Seltzer was ratted out... by her own sister. So that probably made for an awkward Thanksgiving.

Seltzer got the idea, she claimed, by hanging out very briefly at Grant High School in a less affluent area of the San Fernando Valley. These were the stories, she claimed, of friends and acquaintances she had made during that time and she felt their stories should be heard.

The Grant High School Marching Bloods.

As to why she chose to tell those stories as though they had happened to her, we're not entirely certain. Perhaps she thought it might give her some of the "street cred" that is so desperately necessary when attempting to "represent" to the "homies" at Trader Joe's.

3 The Third Eye

The Book:

In 1956, a publishing sensation swept through England. Finally, finally, someone had written a true-life story about being a Tibetan lama... and there was magic and ninjas and stuff in it! Just what the country ordered!

The Third Eye, authored by a man with the improbably hilarious name of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, told the true story of a young Tibetan boy (the author) who became a lama (religious teacher) at a young age. Over the next few years he flies, meets yetis and has a hole drilled in his forehead to open his "third eye." Why does he do this last thing? Because the Dalai Lama has foreseen the Chinese re-taking of Tibet, and Lobsang's third eye will give him super-powers for reading minds.

Having lived through far too much awesomeness for one book, he continued it in sequels in which Lobsang flies airplanes for the Chinese in WW II, gets captured and spends time in a P.O.W. camp, survives Hiroshima, goes to England, is tortured, escapes his torturers in a luxury car and finally...

The Bullshit:

... he dies. Yes, he wrote his own death into his autobiography. While he was walking around alive.

To be fair to his publishers, he didn't work the whole "And then I totally died!" part in until his third book. And it was probably a James Frey situation, where the guy really was a lama but had to spice things up a little. Or a lot.

The Crash:

The famous Tibetologist and adventurer Heinrich Harrer (played by dream-boat Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet) became suspicious of Lobsang and hired a private detective to track the elusive lama down. And that detective did find his man... namely, Cyril Henry Hoskins, an Irish plumber's son who knew no Tibetan, had never been to Tibet and in fact did not even have a passport.

When all the academics cried in unison "Shenanigans, sir!" Cyril waved it off and told them the real story: That he was Tuesday Lobsang Rampa's spirit, and he was inhabiting the body of Cyril Hoskins. Undeterred, the man went on to write 24 books total, including tale about his real trip to Venus in a spaceship.

2 Angel at the Fence and A Memoire of the Holocaust Years

This one's a double entry, thanks to two authors pulling the same stunt: heartfelt stories from the Holocaust. And as we're about to demonstrate in detail, there are many reasons to believe the Holocaust simply did not occur.

Ha, no. Just kidding. Seriously, don't take that out of context.

The Books:

Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence is a touching and inspiring memoir, we're sure. It details his time in Schlieben, a sub-camp of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp, as a 12-year-old boy. He is befriended by a local girl named Roma, who sneaks him apples and bread through the fence separating them.

Years later, in 1958, they meet on a blind date. The conversation turns to "horrific trials through which we have endured" (as it always does on dates, or at least ours, followed by an awkward silence over our salads). The couple realize that they have miraculously found each other again.

As incredible as that is, even more amazing is Misha Defonseca's tale in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. Another harrowing tale of a child, alone, surviving WW II in battle-ravaged Europe, Misha sets out her astonishing journey. She walks from Belgium to the Ukraine in search of her parents, who had been captured by Nazis. She stabs to death a Nazi rapist. She is taken in and protected by a pack of wolves, even sharing in their kill... all of this before she's 11-years-old.

Wait a second...

The Bullshit:

In Rosenblat's case, not everything in Angel at the Fence is complete and utter lies. He did survive Schlieben. He and Roma did meet on a blind date in New York years later. But the part about how he knew her back then, and her sneaking food to him over the fence has been questioned by historical scholars who noticed that at Schlieben, the place where she was supposedly meeting him to pass food, was right next to the SS barracks.

As for Misha, some have found the idea of a seven-year-old making a 3,000 mile trek across Nazi occupied territory subsisting on mud and raw meat while being coddled by wolves a little hard to swallow. Not us. Around these parts, we call that "Thursday."

The Crash:

Upon his lies being exposed to the world at large, an apparently care-free Rosenblat defended his story in Angel at the Fence with, "I wanted to bring happiness to people. I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world."

We're not completely sure how his story was supposed to make us feel better about the Holocaust. Actually, a better defense would have been, "I survived the fucking Holocaust. You shut the fuck up now." Still, the publisher cancelled the book.

As for Misha and the wolves... it took ten years for this obvious pile of deceit to be exposed. TEN. YEARS.

She first told the story at a Jewish temple on Holocaust Memorial Day. During a candle-lighting remembrance ceremony Misha asked to light a candle for the animals. The rabbi thought it was more than passing strange but allowed it and Misha's story spilled out. Everyone was very moved. She sold it to a publisher a short time later.

Eventually they discovered that "Misha Defonseca" is actually Monique De Wael and, though her parents were tragically taken by the Nazis, she never wandered across Europe and, in fact, was not Jewish. Monique's defense of this deception was, sadly, somewhat typical: It may not have been the truth, but it was her truth. In the dictionary this is known as a "lie."

Still, wouldn't it be awesome if it turned out the only part of her story that was true was the wolf thing?

1 The Amityville Horror

The Book:

Nothing makes a spooky story spookier than the addition of, "Oh my God, you guys, I totally swear that this is totally, totally true. It totally happened. Totally." William Blatty used this to great effect with his book The Exorcist (allegedly "Based on a True Story" but in fact based a half-remembered article from 1949).

In the wake of all the cash The Exorcist made, along came George and Kathy Lutz. They were a normal family who purchased a house in Amityville on Long Island, New York and 28 days later were driven from it by TOTALLY REAL YOU GUYS demonic forces.

It turns out, the year before they moved in, that house hosted a brutal murder (Ronald "Butch" Defeo, Jr. blew away his family). His lawyer attempted an insanity defense which was kind of contradicted by the fact that "Butch" had done little things like pick up the spent shell casings to thwart the crime scene investigators. This will be important later.

Anyway, the Lutzes bought the house a little over a year after the crime and, they alleged, almost immediately bad shit happened.

They told and sold their harrowing tale to writer Jay Anson, who didn't bother to show up and look at the house, but instead wrote the book based upon the 45 hours of taped stories the Lutzes sent him, which we imagine went something like: "... so, then, like, this... pass the bottle, dude... I said give it to me! Fuck!... then this... stuff... um... SLIME, yeah, that's... yeah... this slime came out of the walls... dude we need to make a booze run."

Film rights were sold, money was made... and that's when it all started going to shit.

The Bullshit:

For starters, in the book the priest they had come and bless the house allegedly heard a voice say "Get out!", felt a slap on the face and suffered stigmata-like blisters. In real life, Father Pecoraro (who was apparently not in on the scam) denied anything happened. He even claimed in an affidavit that he never went to the house, but only spoke to the Lutzes by phone.

A possible reason given for this massive infestation of malignant spirits was that the Shinnecock (seriously?) Indian tribe used the local area as a place to ditch their insane, decrepit and dying tribe members. Which would be totally awesome except for the fact that they didn't. Ever.

Shinnecock Indian.

The Crash:

Remember Butch Defeo, the guy who committed all of those murders in the house that caused the haunting? Well William Weber, Butch's defense lawyer, came forward and claimed he and the Lutzes made the whole thing up over "several bottles of wine." Many lawsuits were filed, and the Lutz family continues to insist the story was "mostly true."

And really, why would they lie? Hey, did we mention that in addition to all of the book sales, NINE films have been made based on the story? And why not? It's totally true, you guys.

If you enjoyed reading about phonies you've never heard of, find out about the phonies who inspired you to never give up in 6 Inspiring Rags to Riches Stories (That Are Bullshit). Or get ready to really have your mind blown in 7 Movies Based on a True Story (That Are Complete Bullshit).