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LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 Author Amy Griffin sued a former classmate for defamation on Monday, saying the woman\u2019s statements in a New York Times story and a subsequent lawsuit alleging Griffin appropriated her stories of sexual abuse for her bestselling 2025 memoir \u201cThe Tell\u201d are false in \u201cevery element.\u201d<\/p>\n
Griffin\u2019s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Nevada, says that in 2025 her former middle school classmate \u201ctold The New York Times \u2014 and through it, the world \u2014 that Amy Griffin is a fraud and a thief.\u201d<\/p>\n
The lawsuit says that in the woman\u2019s telling, \u201cMrs. Griffin stole the rape of another woman and built a bestseller on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Times spokesperson said the lawsuit misrepresents its story and reporting. The former classmate said her account will prove true in court.<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Tell,\u201d a hit that became an Oprah\u2019s Book Club selection, Griffin, a venture capitalist and memoirist, recounts being sexually abused as a child by a teacher at her middle school in Amarillo, Texas, and writes that years later she recovered memories of the experience by undergoing therapy using the psychedelic drug MDMA.<\/p>\n
The Times story published six months after the book included stories from a classmate who said some of Griffin\u2019s experiences were eerily similar to her own. Then in March the woman filed a lawsuit in California state court, which Griffin is fighting and seeking to have dismissed.<\/p>\n
The Associated Press doesn\u2019t typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly or otherwise consent. The woman who sued Griffin filed her lawsuit as Jane Doe, and her name did not appear in the Times story. Griffin\u2019s lawsuit says the most essential fact is that she put her account of her abuse in writing in 2020, and in 2021 she provided another detailed and documented account in an interview with the Amarillo Police Department. Both accounts match up with the book, and both came before Griffin is alleged to have extracted the woman\u2019s abuse story by having someone posing as a talent agent call her in 2022, according to the lawsuit. The statute of limitations prevented the criminal investigation from moving forward.<\/p>\n Griffin\u2019s lawsuit says the woman falsely claimed to be another middle school classmate who appears in \u201cThe Tell\u201d under the pseudonym \u201cClaudia,\u201d whose meeting with the author is recounted in the book. The lawsuit Griffin had not talked to the woman in more than 35 years, had never been part of the same church youth group as alleged, and was demonstrably not in the Palm Springs area in 2019 \u2014 or the years before or after \u2014 when the woman claims the two of them met for coffee.<\/p>\n Griffin\u2019s lawsuit says the coffee shop conversation with \u201cClaudia\u201d took place thousands of miles away in the presence of a collaborator, and that the woman in the Times story had been unable to produce any evidence the meeting with her had taken place. In an email to The Associated Press sent through her lawyers, the woman said the shame and humiliation from her sexual assault were unimaginable and she was \u201cviolated all over again after reading about my own experiences in Amy\u2019s book.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDespite trying to remain anonymous, Amy has now chosen to use her immense wealth and influence to try and silence me,\u201d the email said. \u201cShe has had her lawyers identify me publicly as well as sue me. I am shocked and disappointed that she would choose to take this route, especially since she herself knows the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n Griffin\u2019s lawsuit seeks a declaration that the allegations that she stole the woman\u2019s abuse stories are false, along with financial damages to be determined at trial. Griffin\u2019s lawsuit, while not naming the Times as a defendant, is harshly critical of the paper, saying it \u201cdeemed the story too good to scrutinize\u201d despite Griffin\u2019s lawyers making it clear the woman\u2019s account was \u201cdemonstrably false.\u201d<\/p>\n Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email to the AP that the lawsuit and related filings \u201crepeatedly misrepresent The New York Times story and its reporting,\u201d and that the article \u201cis markedly different in key aspects put forth\u201d in both women\u2019s lawsuits.<\/p>\n Rhoades points out that many of the allegations Griffin is pushing back against did not appear in the Times\u2019 story, including that the woman they spoke to was \u201cClaudia,\u201d or that a person posing as a talent agent on Griffin\u2019s behalf called to get her stories of abuse.<\/p>\n And Rhoades said the Times story did not say Griffin \u201cmisappropriated\u201d the woman\u2019s story, and she said claims that the reporters did not vet their story are false, and that they \u201cengaged extensively with Ms. Griffin\u2019s legal representatives prior to publication including meticulous fact checking.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur 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\u2019s hometown,\u201d Rhoades said. \u201cOur reporters\u2019 only agenda was to pursue the facts, including corroboration of accounts from all sources.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 Author Amy Griffin sued a former classmate for defamation on Monday, saying the woman\u2019s statements in a New York Times story and a subsequent lawsuit alleging Griffin appropriated her stories of sexual abuse for her bestselling 2025 memoir \u201cThe Tell\u201d are false in \u201cevery element.\u201d Griffin\u2019s lawsuit, filed in federal court … Continue reading Author Amy Griffin sues woman who alleged she stole her stories of sexual abuse in memoir \u2018The Tell\u2019<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":1515963,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1451],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1515962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abc-entertainment-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":true,"date":"2026-06-18 12:50:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[0],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1515962"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1515967,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515962\/revisions\/1515967"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1515963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1515962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1515962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1515962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nGriffin says documentation backs her in every aspect<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nAccuser says this is an attempt to silence her<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nNew York Times stands by its reporting and story<\/strong><\/p>\n