“Princess” Plagiarism Suit Provides Rare Look Into Literary Arab-Bashing

by Richard H. Curtiss

Friederike Monika Adsani is a petite Austrian woman with a turned-up nose whose domineering father and acquiescent mother entrusted her education to Catholic nuns, against whose strict rules she constantly rebelled. She expressed her rebellious nature by marrying a handsome British-educated medical student, whom she adored initially, from a wealthy and powerful Kuwaiti family.

To thwart her hostile mother-in-law, who invoked witchcraft to break up their marriage, Monika and her husband moved into a luxurious home they had helped design themselves with a garden and a private zoo next to a mosque. But her rebellion against a male-dominated society, her husband’s proclivity to side with his mother in frequent family disputes, his alcoholism, and his alleged dalliances with prostitutes which resulted in her contracting a venereal disease, finally drove both of the lovers to violent quarrels.

Adsani fled to Austria, obtained a divorce, and wrote a book about her experiences which she entitled Cinderella in Arabia. She submitted the manuscript to American literary agent Peter Miller. A year later Miller informed Adsani that there was no possibility of turning the manuscript as she had submitted it into a book, much less a film, which is where the money is in the publishing world. Miller allegedly told Adsani that to sell the book “we need a hook. It must be more sensational. If only you were an Arabic princess.” She turned the manuscript over to another agent.

Then, on Aug. 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. In a fit of pique, Adsani telephoned Miller in December 1990, to point out that if her book were in print, it probably would be headed for the best-seller list. Miller asked her for another opportunity to represent her, but Adsani turned him down.

When the Gulf war was over, Monika Adsani still was hoping her new agent would find a publisher for her manuscript when, in September 1992, Atlanta-based author Jean Sasson brought out her second, best-selling Middle East-related book. Sasson’s first best-seller had been subsidized by the Embassy of Kuwait in Washington. Entitled The Rape of Kuwait, it had recounted horrors of the Iraqi occupation. The Kuwaiti government had distributed at no charge a quarter of a million copies to U.S. military personnel assembling in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to end that occupation.

Now, Jean Sasson again had hit best-seller lists with a book entitled Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil. The book purported to be based upon the diaries of “Princess Sultana,” an alias for a petite, snub-nosed granddaughter of King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, founder of the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The princess purportedly was raised in the luxurious palace of a cruel and domineering father and a kind but overly acquiescent mother. Even as a child Princess Sultana rebelled at the subservient role ordained for her in a male-dominated society. She expressed her rebellion by outraging the mother of the handsome young British-educated lawyer cousin with whom her father had arranged a marriage.

Although her mother-in-law resorted to witchcraft to break up the marriage, the young couple moved to a luxurious home they had helped design themselves with a garden and a private zoo adjacent to a mosque. Finally her husband’s proclivity to side with his mother in the unending family battles, his alcoholism, and his dalliances with prostitutes, which resulted in her contracting a venereal disease, drove the young lovers to violence against each other. Sultana fled to France where she lived for several months with her three children until she obtained a written promise from her husband never to take a second wife if she returned to Saudi Arabia.

A sequel, Princess: Sultana’s Daughters, takes up Sasson’s story of Sultana’s life back in Saudi Arabia and the effects on her son and two daughters of the male excesses and extreme female repression that she depicts in her version of Saudi society. It, too, allegedly was prepared by Jean Sasson from notes smuggled to her by the princess whose “life and safety in Saudi Arabia” would be jeopardized if her identity were ever revealed, according to Sasson’s and the publisher’s New York copyright lawyer.

Monika Adsani, however, felt certain that she knew whose life story had provided the inspiration for the story of the “Saudi princess.” She concluded that the “diaries and notes” which Jean Sasson said she used to assemble the two books were, in fact, Mrs. Adsani’s own manuscript, allegedly made available to Ms. Sasson by their mutual American agent, Peter Miller. Adsani has initiated a plagiarism suit against Miller, Sasson, and Sasson’s publishers and distributors in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.

Adsani’s current suit, along with an earlier one over author’s royalties initiated by Ms. Sasson against the publishers of her first book, The Rape of Kuwait, provide a rare look into the world of literary Arab-bashing, which is driven primarily by the Hollywood film industry’s seemingly insatiable appetite for works in which Arabs are the villains.

In fact Ms. Sasson’s first book purportedly was written in nine days and was published concurrently with a campaign for which the U.S. public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton “got nearly $10.8 million from the Kuwaitis” for helping the Kuwaiti embassy with public and congressional relations during the Gulf war, according to an article by John R. MacArthur in the March 11, 1996 issue of the New York Observer.

In addition to the quarter-million copies purchased by the Kuwaiti government for distribution to U.S. troops, 700,000 more copies of the book, apparently also subsidized by the Kuwaiti government, were shipped by Knightsbridge Press of California at a cost of $200,000 by Federal Express to wholesalers and dealers. Of those, perhaps 30 percent were sold.

The subject of the earlier lawsuit was Ms. Sasson’s claim that Knightsbridge owed her more author’s royalties than she had received. Gerald Sindell, former chief executive officer of Knightsbridge, which subsequently went out of business, countered that the expedited shipping, ordered by David Abramowitz, a company employee who was a close friend and confidant of Ms. Sasson, had incurred “enormous expense” which Sindell had not authorized. Subsequently Sindell has become an important witness against Mr. Miller and Ms. Sasson in the plagiarism suit involving Princess.

Summarized, Monika Adsani’s suit charges that there is no Princess Sultana, that Sasson’s two Princess books were derived in part from Adsani’s manuscript, and that many of the events and even some of the language of the first book is taken directly from that manuscript.

“Before filing our lawsuit, we offered to drop all claims against Jean Sasson and the publishers, William Morrow & Company and Doubleday, if they could produce an authentic copy of the alleged Saudi princess’ diary that matched Sasson’s Princess story,” explains Adsani’s lawyer, Bruce Lagerman of Lagerman & Jones in Reston, VA. “To this day, both Sasson and the publishers have adamantly refused to produce this diary they claim exists.”

To buttress the case that there is no Princess, Lagerman has affidavits from two prominent authorities who attest that the book contains egregious errors of fact that no genuine Saudi could possibly make, and describes “personal experiences” so grotesque that they would be widely known within Saudi Arabia if they really had occurred within the royal family.

In his affidavit, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akins concludes that “the books were not ‘written’ or ‘inspired’ or ‘approved’ by any Saudi princess” and that “it is quite clear that ‘Sultana’ does not exist.” Explaining this conclusion, Akins lists several examples of errors of fact. One is the statement in Sasson’s first Princess book that women “are forbidden entry into mosques in my country.” Any Saudi would know this is not true, Akins states. Not only do many Saudi mosques “have special sections reserved for women,” his deposition notes, but “at each prayer time—five times a day—Saudi TV shows worshippers at the Grand Mosque of Mecca and there are always women among the worshippers.”

Akins’ affidavit also cites the gruesome tale of a close friend of Sultana who, the book says, was caught conducting liaisons with foreign men in Riyadh. The book says that although Sultana’s friend was released to her father by the morals police when they determined that she was still a virgin, her father had her chained and drowned in the family swimming pool with the entire family forced to watch the “execution.”

Wrote Akins: “This story, if true, would be so extraordinary it would be widely known in Riyadh. It is not. I have not met one Saudi who was not horrified by the tale and by the prospect that Americans could take it seriously.” In fact, Akins states, although many Saudis have seen or heard of the book while traveling abroad, it has occasioned no speculation as to the real identity of “Princess Sultana” because Saudis consider it a forgery

In a separate affidavit, Dr. Jack Shaheen, author of The TV Arab and a frequent lecturer on Arab stereotyping in the American media, concludes “that the character named ‘Sultana’ is absolutely pure fictionshe does not exist.” He continues, “I do not believe Jean Sasson conducted interviews with a Saudi princess. Nor do I believe that the texts are based upon a Saudi Arabian princess’s diary or upon her personal notes.”

Among errors he cites are the statement in both of Sasson’s books that Sultana’s older sisters and other older women in the Saudi royal family had been subjected to female circumcision, which in fact is a custom rooted in Africa, not the Middle East. “Female circumcision is not and has never been practiced by female members of the Saudi Arabian royal family,” Shaheen writes.

He cites also erroneous statements concerning the dowry, veiling, and, perhaps most telling of all, the reference to an “Egyptian female imam.” “An imam is an Islamic priest,” Shaheen writes. “There are no female imams.”

Lagerman also has an affidavit from a British private investigator who was told by a former colleague and friend of Ms. Sasson from the decade she lived in Riyadh that Princess “was a mix of fact and fiction…It was not really biographical, but an account based on expatriate folklore…Jean Sasson had a good eye for what people wanted to hear.”

In his response to these affidavits, Richard Dannay, lawyer for Sasson, her publishers and distributors, sought to separate the issue of whether or not the “princess” really exists from the issue of plagiarism. “Even if it were assumed, just for argument’s sake, that Princess Sultana is fictional, it would not follow that Princess or anything else was ‘copied’ or ‘stolen’ from plaintiff,” Dannay wrote.

Responds Lagerman, “We are determined to expose the fact that Jean Sasson completely fabricated ‘Sultana.’ Sasson lied when she said ‘Sultana’ asked her to write her life story, lied about ‘Sultana’ giving Sasson her personal diaries, and lied about ‘Sultana’ co-authoring Sasson’s Princess manuscript. So where did Sasson get the material to write nearly 300 pages on ‘Sultana’s life? We have the evidence to prove that Monika Adsani’s unpublished manuscript was handed over to Sasson by Adsani’s own New York literary agent, Peter Miller.”

The evidence includes a 16-page statement, backed up by 32 pages of examples, by Dr. R. Victoria Arana, professor of English at Howard University, “that Princess and Sultana’s Daughters are substantially similar to Monika Adsani’s manuscript entitled Cinderella in Arabia.”

Writes Arana, “Anyone who reads the Adsani work attentively and appreciatively and then reads the Sasson books will be struck by their obvious similarities. Such a reader would also note that the Adsani manuscript is more vibrant, richer, and more detailed than the Sasson texts.”

Equally damaging are statements in a sworn declaration by Sindell, the former chief executive of Knightsbridge Publishing Company in California, which published The Rape of Kuwait during its brief corporate existence from 1989 through 1992. Noting that Knightsbridge previously had published some books provided by literary agent Miller, Sindell wrote: “In December 1990 Peter Miller approached Knightsbridge to pitch a non-fiction manuscript by a woman who he said had lived many years in the Gulf region. Mr. Miller told me he was approaching Knightsbridge because I previously told him Knightsbridge was publishing Jean Sasson’s The Rape of Kuwait...

“With the Gulf War imminent, many Gulf-related manuscripts were being pitched to publishers at that time. Although Mr. Miller did not identify his client by name, he described her manuscript as the true story of the woman’s life in either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait....

“Peter Miller stated that the manuscript would need a ‘ghost-writer’ to place the book in proper condition to be published. Peter Miller also told me that this book would be much more successful if it were published under Jean Sasson’s name...”

While the plagiarism suit is pending, published comments of some of the principals seem especially significant. Sasson, who was employed as a secretary at a hospital in Riyadh for four years and who remained in the Saudi capital for another six years as the wife of a British insurance salesman, Peter Sasson, writes in her acknowledgments for the first Princess book:

“Thank you, Sultana, for bravely sharing your life story with the world. By taking this bold step, you have helped to humanize the Arabs, a people misunderstood by the West. My hope is that by revealing the intimate details of your life as an Arab woman, in all its pain and glory, your story will help to dispel the many negative stereotypes held of your people throughout the world.”

It is questionable whether Sasson’s story, which demonizes virtually all Saudi men and paints an exceedingly bleak picture of life in the desert kingdom, has helped with her declared purpose of banishing negative stereotypes, if that was her purpose. There is little question, however, that both Princess books have made a lot of money for Sasson, her publishers, William Morrow and Doubleday, and presumably for her agent, Peter Miller.

That makes even more poignant two consecutive entries on Peter Miller in the Insider’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers and Literary Agents by Jeff Herman, distributed by Prima Publishing of Rocklin, California. Asked by Herman to describe for the 1994-1995 guide “the client from hell,” Miller replied: “One who calls three or four times a day before we have anything to report.” Asked the same question for the 1995-1996 guide after the Adsani lawsuit was filed, Miller replied: “One who calls you three times a day, doesn’t have a computer, and stole another author’s manuscript and submitted it as their own.”

Perhaps even more pertinent is a comment to a reporter who published an article on “Copyright Wars” in The Washington Post on June 19, 1995. New York lawyer Carl Person, who represents literary agent Miller against the Adsani charges, normally represents plaintiffs rather than defendants in copyright suits. He told Post writer Saundra Torry that defendants’ greed is spawning copyright litigation. “Hollywood is a closed shop,” and when an outsider comes along with a good idea “no one is willing to back an unknown,” Person said. So the ideas are taken, and those taking them “hope they are not going to get caught.”