Sally Field's 'Sybil' was a lie: Best-selling child abuse and split personality author exposed as a fake

Victim? Shirley Mason, who was revealed to be the basis for Sybil, said in a 1958 letter that she was lying

It was a best-selling 'true story' that planted the notion of repressed memory syndrome in the American consciousness.

The shocking account of Sybil, a girl with 16 separate personalities that developed as a result of horrendous childhood abuses, sold seven million copies, and even spawned a recognised syndrome, 'multiple personality disorder.



The 1973 book told the story of Sybil Dorsett, later revealed to be Shirley Mason, whose personality had been splintered into more than a dozen distinct characters including a baby and two males.

But the titillating tale, serialised across the nation, has now been exposed as a fake, concocted by three women as a calculated money-making invention

A new book 'Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case' denounces the account as a fiction.



According to the author, Debbie Nathan, the memoir was cooked up by three individuals hungry for fame and fortune: Mason, her therapist Cornelia (Connie) Wilbur and journalist Flora Schreiber.

Mason had indeed had a troubled upbringing. She had come from a strict Minnesota Seventh Day Adventist family and had a nervous disposition, the New York Post reported.



She had been abused as a child and had also suffered from OCD tendencies.

As a graduate student in New York in the 1950s, Mason was in therapy.



But in treating her patient, therapist Connie Wilbur prescribed a cornucopia of wonder drugs: Seconal, Demerol, Edrisal and Daprisal, including several that have now been discredited.



Bestseller: The 'memories' of Shirley Mason, left, became Flora Schreiber's best-selling book, Sybil, right

Yet another, Pentathol, hailed at the time as a truth serum, is now believed to encourage patients to describe fantasies or experiences that could never have happened.

After one pivotal session, in which Mason described episodes in which she became different people, with multiple names and personalities, Wilbur saw an opportunity, Nathan claims.

She suggested that her patient become the subject of a book.

In return, Wilbur would cover the costs of the young student's medical school tuition and living expenses, the New York Post reported.



'I am all of them. I have essentially been lying… as trying to show you I felt I needed help'

The two later aligned with writer Schreiber to concoct a story packed with sexual perversion and abuse that thrilled and titillated their readers.



Schreiber specialised in 'real-life' women's magazine stories and correctly predicted that with the right focus, grotesque child abuse including 'scenes of Sybil's mother defecating on lawns, conducting lesbian orgies and raping her daughter with kitchen utensils' the book would captivate the masses, writes Nathan.



In a 1958 letter held in the archives at New York’s John Jay College, Mason confessed that she didn't 'have any multiple personalities, ' the New York Post reported.



Exposed: Author Debbie Nathan says the 1973 book Sybil is nothing but a fraud



In the letter uncovered by Nathan, Mason writes: 'I am all of them. I have essentially been lying… as trying to show you I felt I needed help.'

She added in the letter: 'Quite thrilling. Got me a lot of attention.'

Nathan's book claims that Schreiber and Wilbur together drew the astonishing tales, out of willing collaborator Mason.

Some of the more incredible incidents included a war-time excursion to Nazi-occupied Holland.



Questions over the book’s authenticity have remained decades after it was published, not least because all three protagonists are now dead.



Sybil on the screen: Sally Field (left) played the title role in a 1976 film adaptation of the book

Shirley Ardell Mason died of breast cancer in 1998. Wilbur had died in 1992 and Schreiber in 1988.

The book's enduring legacy has been to create multiple personality disorder as an officially recognised illness.



As thousands of readers, convinced they too had repressed memories of childhood abuse, a n almost unknown affliction snowballed into 40,000 reported cases.

Now in the past decade, science has started to question the syndrome itself.

