Those were not even the worst pages of Deodato's work by half. Goddamn nineties, I just don't know.
Donna's a bit of a mystery. As WML presents it she's pretty much a trick Circe played on herself; she's no more "real" or "fake" than, say, Superman is if Superman forgot he was also Clark Kent. This doesn't completely work if you accept the way she hooked up with Ares Buchanan as true, however - the timeline simply doesn't line up - so Priest (I think) later suggested that Circe had taken someone else's recently vacated life, much the way J'onn did with John Jones (and actually most of his other alter egos). Either way, though, the one we see isn't a separate person, just a separate persona of Circe.