In October 1835, the American Protestant Vindicator, a newspaper published by Dr. W.C. Brownlee, pastor of New York’s Collegiate Dutch Reformed Church, began serializing tales of sexual abuse purported to have occurred in the Hotel Dieu, a Roman Catholic nunnery in Montreal, as related by an escaped novice, Maria Monk.

Maria claimed the Hotel Dieu was riddled with secret entrances, tunnels, and prisons. Priests nightly debauched the nuns, entering through a subterranean passage from a neighboring monastery. The “fruits of priestly lust” were strangled at birth and their bodies tossed into a lime-filled pit under the convent, as were those of nuns who refused the priests’ amorous advances. Impregnated by a priest, Maria had escaped the nunnery to prevent her baby’s murder.

Four months later, in January 1836, Maria, an attractive girl of 19, arrived in New York, escorted by the Reverend W.K. Hoyt, who claimed he had rescued her from a “life of Sin” in the convent. Hoyt arranged the serial’s publication in book form as “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk” through an imprint of the nativist publishing house Harper Brothers. Maria’s book would be an antebellum best seller, second only to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The book sold 20,000 copies almost overnight, an incredible sale for the era. Excerpts appeared in most of the dailies, including The New York Sun.

Anti-Catholicism had long flourished in New York. John Jay had sought to have the State’s constitution prohibit Catholicism. As early as 1809, nativist rioters had mobbed St. Peter’s Church. The early 1830s had seen a rise in violence against Irish-Catholic immigrants. Now Maria’s book further inflamed anti-Catholic sentiments. Even inventor, painter, and sculptor Samuel F. B. Morse, who dabbled in rightist politics, ran for mayor in 1836 as an anti-Catholic candidate.

Maria’s overnight fame piqued the curiosity of Colonel William Leete Stone, editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser. Though Stone mistrusted Catholicism, he sensed a story and went to Montreal in the fall of 1836. The local bishop permitted him to enter the Hotel Dieu. Accompanied by several local Protestant businessmen, Stone searched the building, including its cellars and the nuns’ quarters, with “Awful Disclosures” in hand. He found no correspondence between the building he was exploring and its description in the book, let alone evidence of the tunnels, prisons, and mass graves Maria had described.

On returning to New York, Stone interviewed Maria about the convent he had explored only days before. Stone realized Maria had never “been within the walls of the cloister,” and the Commercial Advertiser announced: “Maria Monk is an impostor, and her book and all its essential features are calumnies.” Even Maria’s mother denied that her daughter had ever entered a nunnery. She said that in 1835, Hoyt had offered her a substantial bribe to state that her daughter had entered a nunnery, which she had refused.

Of course, if one wants to believe, facts mean nothing. Maria claimed that the convent had been renovated since her escape.

It fell apart over the money. When Hoyt realized Brownlee had somehow persuaded Maria to sign the book’s royalties over to Brownlee’s Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge, he denounced her as a “damned jilting jade.” Another clergyman, John Jay Slocum, was appointed Maria’s legal guardian and sued the SDCK and Harper Brothers on her behalf for a share of the profits. Now the dirt came out.

Testimony showed Maria’s first meeting with Hoyt had occurred at a street corner, when Maria was a prostitute plying her trade. During the years that she had supposedly been a novice, she had been an inmate of the Magdalen Asylum, a residence for reforming prostitutes. Maria hadn’t written the book: Hoyt had transcribed and embellished her fantasies of convent life. These, not being strong enough for the SDCK, had been fleshed out by professional journalist Theodore Dwight with chilling details plagiarized from lurid European anti-clerical pamphlets rich with pornographic allegations of torture, brothel-like convents, and lustful priests.

In August 1837, Maria appeared at the home of Philadelphia physician W.W. Sleigh. She told him of being kidnapped by a group of priests, held captive in a nearby convent, and making a narrow escape. Sleigh contacted Slocum, who persuaded Maria to return to New York. The adventure yielded a bestselling sequel, “Further Disclosures of Maria Monk,” ghosted by Slocum, who also persuaded her to sign over all rights to both books. By then, they had taken on a life of their own that did not require Maria’s presence, and she never received a penny from them.

After drifting to the lower depths, Maria was arrested in 1849 for picking a customer’s pocket in a Five Points whorehouse. She was sentenced to Blackwell’s Island, where she died that September, aged 33.

“Awful Disclosures” has remained in print for nearly 170 years.