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- The memoir The Tell became an instant bestseller after its March 2025 publication, aided by a ghostwriter and celebrity support.
- A former classmate told The New York Times parts of the book mirrored her own middle-school assault, prompting her to sue in California.
- Amy Griffin says she documented recovered memories in 2020, denies fabrication, and calls the classmate's accusations false.
- Lawyers clashed: classmate's attorney called Griffin's suit a PR move; Griffin's lawyer accused The New York Times of promoting false allegations.
Amy Griffin, the author of the memoir “The Tell,” filed a lawsuit on Monday saying a childhood classmate defamed her with the accusation that she had appropriated the classmate’s own experience of sexual abuse and presented it as her own in the book.
Ms. Griffin’s suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Nevada on Monday, accused the classmate of falsely painting Ms. Griffin as a “fraud and a thief.”
It is the latest legal twist surrounding the book, in which Ms. Griffin, a billionaire and philanthropist, describes sexual abuse at the hands of a schoolteacher while she was in middle school in Texas in the 1980s. In the book, she says her memories of the abuse were recovered 30 years later while she was undergoing therapy using MDMA, an illegal psychedelic drug.
Published in March 2025, “The Tell” became an instant best seller. Ms Griffin, a first-time author, was helped along by a ghostwriter and a swell of social media support from a network of famous friends and business partners.
The former classmate became aware of “The Tell” after being contacted by reporters from The New York Times in the summer of 2025 — months after the book’s publication — as the newspaper investigated how Ms. Griffin had shot to the top of the publishing charts.
The Times published an article in September 2025 under the headline “The Billionaire, the Psychedelics and the Best-Selling Memoir.” In it, the classmate, who spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity to maintain her privacy, said that parts of Ms. Griffin’s book were strikingly similar to her own experience of being sexually assaulted in the middle school they both attended in the 1980s. The classmate is named in Ms. Griffin’s suit, but has not been widely named elsewhere.
In March, the classmate filed a lawsuit in California that highlighted two episodes from the book: an assault at a middle-school dance and another in a school bathroom, in which Ms. Griffin said the teacher tied her hands behind her back with a bandanna. The classmate said that those attacks had happened to her, but that Ms. Griffin had presented them as her own recovered memories.
The classmate told The Times for its September 2025 article that the teacher who assaulted her was not the teacher whom Ms. Griffin accuses in her book.
The woman additionally said in her lawsuit that she met with Ms. Griffin at a California coffee shop in 2019 to discuss their childhoods in Texas.
However, in her own lawsuit filed this week, Ms. Griffin said the two women had not spoken since they attended school together 35 years ago.
Ms. Griffin said she began writing her own memories of the abuse in 2020, long before the classmate revealed her own experience publicly. She has denied that any element of her experience or her memory was fabricated, and said in her lawsuit that “every element” of her old classmate’s accusations was “false.”
“‘The Tell’ recounts Mrs. Griffin’s own abuse,” Ms. Griffin’s lawsuit says.
In an emailed statement, Zach Rosenblatt, a lawyer for the classmate, described Ms. Griffin’s lawsuit as “part of a public relations damage-control campaign.” He said he found it “deeply ironic” that Ms. Griffin used a pseudonym for the abusive teacher in her book while using her former classmate’s name in her lawsuit.
The email included a statement from the classmate, who described the “unimaginable” shame and humiliation she suffered after being sexually assaulted at the school dance.
“I was then violated all over again after reading about my own experiences in Amy’s book, where she falsely claimed them as her own,” she said. “When The New York Times found me and contacted me, I told them the truth.”
Thomas A. Clare, a lawyer for Ms. Griffin, said in an emailed statement that Ms. Griffin’s “accuser has had every opportunity to set the record straight.”
“This lawsuit’s purpose is to make the truth known,” Mr. Clare said. “The New York Times knowingly promoted her false allegations and must also be held accountable.”
Ms. Griffin’s lawsuit accuses The Times of publishing the classmate’s account in a bid to discredit Ms. Griffin. The Times’s story “was a hunt for a reason to disbelieve ‘The Tell,’” the lawsuit says.
The Times disputed those accusations, and defended its reporting.
“The filings repeatedly misrepresent the New York Times story and its reporting,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Our story was about a publishing phenomenon, the reliability of memories recovered while under the influence of MDMA and the impact of a best-selling memoir on the author’s hometown.”
“Our reporters’ only agenda was to pursue the facts, including corroboration of accounts from all sources,” she added.
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