Author and venture capitalist Amy Griffin is suing the woman who accused her of stealing her stories of rape for the bestselling memoir “The Tell.”
Griffin filed a lawsuit against her former classmate for defamation on Monday, claiming that in 2025, the woman “told The New York Times — and through it, the world — that Amy Griffin is a fraud and a thief.”
According to the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Nevada, “The Tell” recounts Griffin’s own harrowing tale of sexual abuse by a middle school teacher in Amarillo, Texas, but the former classmate claims that Griffin’s bestseller was built on stolen material — the rape of the former classmate.
The 2025 memoir garnered high praise from bestseller-inducing trifecta Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager. It was an Oprah’s Book Club pick, a darling on the literary podcast circuit, hyped by Griffin’s longtime bestie Gwyneth Paltrow and included the kind of disturbing and sensational elements that would stir book clubs and group chats across the country.
And stir it did.
The Nerve columnist Maureen Callahan posted a video to YouTube titled, “Here’s Why Everyone Celebrating the New and Controversial Book ‘The Tell’ by Amy Griffin Is Wrong,” which delved into what she called the book’s “missing pieces.” On Goodreads, reviewers were divided, with some praising the book as “brave and necessary” and others writing that “something seems fishy.”
In the memoir, Griffin recounts that she was undergoing an illegal form of psychedelic-drug therapy using MDMA — known on the street as ecstasy or molly — when she recovered buried memories of years-long sexual abuse at the hands of a middle-school teacher that began when she was 12 and lasted for several years.
“This is the story of a secret, a secret kept for decades, one I had buried so deep I didn’t even know it was there,” Griffin writes in the memoir. “Many of us carry secrets, things that we were told not to reveal, or things we simply couldn’t, for fear of judgment or reprisal, or worst of all, for fear that if the people we love found out they’d see us differently. Sometimes we keep secrets to survive, and then a moment arrives when the usefulness of the secret expires. Keeping it becomes the thing that hurts us all. We have to tell. So what is the secret you’ve come to tell?”
The memoir hit bookstore shelves in March 2025, it spent weeks topping bestseller lists, but in September, the New York Times published a bombshell exposé that poked holes in Griffin’s account, and brought to light that Griffin and her husband, hedge fund billionaire John Griffin, invest in a company that backs MDMA.
The Food and Drug Administration formally declined to approve the drug for therapeutic use in August 2024.
“The New York Times interviewed dozens of people from Amarillo, the publishing industry and the medical and MDMA communities, along with Texas authorities, and reviewed the book proposal Ms. Griffin used to pitch her project to publishing houses,” the outlet wrote.
Among those interviews was Griffin’s classmate from more than 35 years prior, who told the outlet that she had been sexually assaulted by a different teacher in the same locations that Griffin detailed, including at the same middle-school dance.
The former classmate filed her own lawsuit against Griffin in March, and used the name Jane Doe to protect her privacy. In the suit, she claims that she was contacted by someone posing as a talent agent or producer and tricked into offering “private details of her life” over the phone in 2022.
According to the former classmate, she and Griffin were classmates and belonged to the same church youth group in the late 1980s. She alleged that at a “Sadie Hawkins” dance, she was sexually assaulted in a closet by one of the school’s teachers and that she was wearing a dress she’d borrowed from Griffin during the assault. She claims she asked for forgiveness while at the church youth group meeting with Griffin in attendance, and returned the dress to Griffin with stains.
The March filing further stated that, a month later, she was sexually assaulted by the same schoolteacher, this time in the bathroom. “This assault was more violent, and during the incident the teacher put his boot on her back, stuffed a bandanna in her mouth, which later caught on her braces, slammed her against the wall, and whipped her with a belt,” reads the suit, which noted that she was 12 at the time, living in a group home, and was too scared to report the assaults.
The former classmate claims that “the details of these two sexual assaults which she was the victim of were later converted by Griffin for use in the memoir ‘The Tell.’”
According to Griffin’s dueling lawsuit, every element of her former classmate’s account is false, and the accusation that Griffin “stole the rape of another woman and built a bestseller on it” is fabricated.
Griffin’s suit claims that her former classmate hadn’t detailed the story as her own until the New York Times sent her a copy of “The Tell,” in search of finding out who the real person behind the memoir’s character “Claudia” was. Griffin further took aim at the New York Times, alleging the outlet deemed the story “too good to scrutinize.”
“‘The Tell’ recounts Mrs. Griffin’s own abuse: memories she recorded in writing and reported to the police before [her former classmate] claims they were stolen,” reads the June filing.
New York Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email to the Associated Press that Griffin’s lawsuit “repeatedly misrepresents The New York Times story and its reporting.”
“Our story was about a publishing phenomenon, the reliability of memories recovered while under the influence of MDMA and the impact of a bestselling memoir on the author’s hometown,” she said. “Our reporters’ only agenda was to pursue the facts, including corroboration of accounts from all sources.”
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