An article in The Sunday Telegraph in February 2009 described her as a "one-time actress" and "former model and beauty queen" who since the late 1990s "has attended and spoken at Holocaust 'revisionist' conferences and written papers on the subject".
[1] She is known for her defence of Holocaust deniers such as David Irving, Robert Faurisson, Bishop Richard Williamson,[2] Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zündel, and Fredrick Töben in broadcasts and her Telling Films documentaries.
"[6] Born Michele Suzanne Mainwaring, in childhood she became a ballet dancer and Member of the Royal Academy of Dancing, and a model, appearing in magazine advertisements and international television commercials.
[8] Mainwaring claimed that she had adopted his mother's family title of Countess Griaznoff (a name also spelled Griaznov or Gryaznov) only for the purposes of charity fundraising.
The Australian reports: Ivan-Zadeh had always been plain "Mr" or "Doctor" but Renouf says the family had once claimed a title through his great-uncle, so she began styling herself as Countess Griaznoff "for my charity work".
Francis was the focus of media interest after losing a substantial part of his fortune and investors' money in the 1987 stockmarket crash and undergoing a dramatic divorce from his second wife in Sydney.
They interviewed her long estranged and terminally ill father Arthur Mainwaring, who was a Korean War reconnaissance aerial photographer and continued this role for the local Port Macquarie News.
Renouf believed her long-estranged and terminally ill father was dead at the time of her second marriage, and put hotelier on the certificate because among many other occupations he had been part of the family business, a long established hotel at The Entrance.
[4] For many years his main occupation was as an aerial photographer, and while travelling between The Entrance and his studio in Sydney he assisted friends and local businesses, acting as a courier for packages.
During her honeymoon in New Zealand in the early 1990s, Renouf had been invited to add stitches to a giant wool tapestry curtain which was its national contribution to the Globe Theatre reconstruction project.
"[1] She has said her interest began when a Jewish member of a committee which she had convened objected to suckling pig being an option on the menu at a dinner she was organising in 1997 for the Globe restoration.
The Australian traced the woman, a "retired American art gallery owner named Wylma Wayne", who denied Renouf's recollections and insisted that her objections had not been related to kosher issues.
Renouf filmed interviews with Lowe and fellow veterans conducted by journalist Phillip Knightley, now archived at the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford.
[20] In the same year, she wrote a letter to the Evening Standard newspaper in London complaining of biased BBC coverage of the Irving-Lipstadt trial, signing it "Lady Renouf, Reform Club, 104 Pall Mall".
Within weeks of the Töben defence team's success, a new legal threat was posed to the British Traditionalist Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson following the broadcast by Swedish television of his comments disputing details of the Holocaust.
[33][34] During 2007–8, she appeared in televised debates with Stephen Sizer, Norman Finkelstein,[35] former CIA station chief George Lambrakis,[36] and Likud strategist Dmitry Shimelfarb[citation needed] as well as TV broadcasts with Dr. Christian Lindtner,[37] Yaqub Zaki, Peter Rushton, Nicholas Kollerstrom, Moeen Yaseen, Riad Al-Taher, Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour and Press TV's Between the Headlines.
[42] Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem told The Australian newspaper: "This woman is especially dangerous, because she is so attractive and can put a pretty face on a very ugly movement.
"[6] The European Jewish Congress quoted Renouf as telling the Tehran International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust in 2006: "anti-Semitism is caused by the anti-gentile nature of Judaism".