Best-Selling Memoirist Sues Classmate Who Said She Used Her Story

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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times a...