A WOMAN who wrote a controversial bestseller about a violent father and sexual abuse by Irish priests says that she will answer her detractors in a new book that will reveal further shocking details.

Kathy O’Beirne’s Don’t Ever Tell has sold more than 300,000 copies but her claims that she was raped and tortured in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries for “fallen women” have been dismissed as fabrications by the religious orders that ran them, by a woman who claims that they knew each other while living at a hostel, and by seven of her brothers and sisters.

O’Beirne told The Times that she had documentary evidence proving her story but when asked to present it she refused. She said that her new book, The Aftermath: Who Am I, would vindicate her. “I have ten abusers in all. There’s files on all of them,” she said.

A spokeswoman for Mainstream, which published Don’t Ever Tell, said that although no contract had been signed for the second book “we would love to do it”.

O’Beirne’s family said this week that their sister was a troubled person who had been exploited by her publisher. They produced a copy of her birth certificate to show that she had not, as the book claims, been adopted. One of the orders that ran the Magdalene Laundries is considering taking legal action.

Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times, said: “This will be by no means the last confession memoir we see — whether this is true or false has no bearing on the matter. The plain truth is that confession memoirs shoot to the top of bestseller lists, and publishers will follow the money.”