Amy Griffin, the author of the memoir “The Tell,” filed a lawsuit Monday, claiming a childhood classmate defamed her by accusing her of appropriating her classmate’s own experience of sexual abuse and presenting it as her own in the book.
Ms. Griffin’s complaint, which was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Nevada, accused the classmate of falsely portraying Ms. Griffin as a “fraud and thief.”
It is the latest legal twist surrounding the book, in which Ms. Griffin, a billionaire and philanthropist, describes sexual abuse by a school teacher while she was in college in Texas in the 1980s. In the book, she says her memories of the abuse were found 30 years later while she was undergoing therapy with MDMA, an illegal psychedelic drug.
Published in March 2025, “The Tell” instantly became a bestseller. Ms. Griffin, a first-time author, was helped by a ghostwriter and an outpouring of support on social media from a network of famous friends and business partners.
The former classmate became aware of “The Tell” after being contacted by reporters at The New York Times in the summer of 2025 — months after the book was published — as the newspaper was investigating how Ms. Griffin had risen to the top of the publication charts.
The Times published an article in September 2025 under the headline “The Billionaire, Psychedelics and the Best-Selling Memoir.” In it, the classmate, who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity to preserve her privacy, said that parts of Ms. Griffin’s book were strikingly similar to her own experience of sexual assault at the college they both attended in the 1980s. The classmate is named in Ms. Griffin’s lawsuit, but has not been widely named elsewhere.
In March, the classmate filed a lawsuit in California highlighting 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 bandana. The classmate said the attacks happened to her, but Ms. Griffin 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 Ms. Griffin accuses in her book.
The woman also said in her lawsuit that she met Ms. Griffin at a California cafe in 2019 to discuss their childhood in Texas.
However, in her own complaint filed this week, Ms Griffin said the two women had not spoken since they went to school together 35 years ago.
Ms. Griffin said she began writing her own memories of the abuse in 2020, long before her classmate publicly revealed her own experience.
Ms. Griffin denied that any part of her experience or memory was fabricated and said in her lawsuit that “every element” of her former classmate’s accusations was “false.”
“‘The Tell’ chronicles Ms. Griffin’s own abuse,” Ms. Griffin’s lawsuit states.
The classmate’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thomas A. Clare, Ms. Griffin’s lawyer, said in an emailed statement that “Ms. Griffin’s accuser has had every opportunity to set the record straight.”
“The purpose of this trial is to get the truth out there,” Mr Clare said. “The New York Times knowingly promoted his false claims and must also be held accountable. »
Ms. Griffin’s lawsuit accuses the Times of publishing her classmate’s story in an effort to discredit Ms. Griffin. The Times story “was a search for a reason not to believe the Tell,” the lawsuit says.
The Times disputed the accusations and defended its reporting.
“The documents repeatedly misrepresent the New York Times story and its reporting,” spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement. “Our story concerned a publishing phenomenon, the reliability of memories recovered under the influence of MDMA, and the impact of a best-selling memoir on the author’s hometown.”
“The sole objective of our journalists was to investigate the facts, including corroborating the accounts of all sources,” she added.
