Author Amy Griffin sued an ex-classmate for defamation on Monday, saying the woman's statements in a New York Times story and a subsequent lawsuit alleging Griffin appropriated her stories of sexual abuse for Griffin's bestselling 2025 memoir The Tell are false in "every element." Griffin's complaint, filed in federal court in Nevada, says her former middle-school classmate told the Times, "and through it, the world, that Amy Griffin is a fraud and a thief," per the AP. Griffin's complaint says that, in the woman's telling, "Mrs. Griffin stole the rape of another woman and built a bestseller on it."
In The Tell, a hit that became an Oprah's Book Club selection, Griffin, a venture capitalist, 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. The Times story, published six months after the book, included stories from a classmate who said some of Griffin's experiences were eerily similar to her own. Then, in March, the woman filed a lawsuit as "Jane Doe" in California state court, which Griffin is fighting and seeking to have dismissed.
Griffin says documentation backs her own narrative in every aspect. Her 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's abuse story by having someone posing as a talent agent call her in 2022, according to the suit. The statute of limitations prevented a criminal investigation from moving forward.
"Amy Griffin's accuser has had every opportunity to set the record straight," Griffin's lawyer, Tom Clare, said in a statement on Tuesday. "This lawsuit's purpose is to make the truth known. The New York Times knowingly promoted her false allegations and must also be held accountable." A Times spokesperson says the lawsuit misrepresents its story and reporting. In an email sent through her lawyers, Griffin's accuser said the shame and humiliation from her sexual assault were unimaginable and that she was "violated all over again after reading about my own experiences in Amy's book." Griffin's suit seeks a declaration that the allegations of her stealing the woman's abuse stories are false, along with financial damages to be determined at trial. More here.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
