Don't forget he also claimed in a televised seminar to have been part of the TV series 7Up, which was demonstrably untrue the moment the words left his mouth.
To those claiming he wasn't a public figure, Simon & Shuster don't publish memoirs of non-public figures. JA claimed he received an advance of 1.4 million (but not which currency). Even that will have been a lie. You'd need to be of megastar proportions to potentially get that and potentially only for a second book after the first was an enormous success (the usual would be an advance plus royalties).
I actually believe the book was his ultimate downfall. There were already significant doubts which he'd brushed off with legal letters and the police. The book is already known to differ in many respects from what he's previously said about his life and there are more wildly unsubstantiated claims according to those who have read it.
He was no longer going to be able to carry on his charades. He was a fabulist with a deep seated insecurity or narcissism that required him to make himself seem vastly more impressive than he was. The book will have made it impossible to go any further. There was no way to stop it all crashing around him.
Without the book, the scrutiny would have died down. There's have been some scandal but he could have disappeared. The book was a step too far. The fallout was inevitable as, I suspect, was his end.
I don't like Cofnas. I think academia has many questions to answer. I think the media did overplay its collective hand but when you start throwing Carter Ruck letters around that pretty much tells them "there's a big story here, keep at it". While others played their part, at the end of it all the person most responsible for it all is, sadly, JA.