LOS ANGELES — Author Amy Griffin sued a former 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 her bestselling 2025 memoir “The Tell” are false in “every element.”Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Griffin’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Nevada, says that in 2025 her former middle school classmate “told The New York Times — and through it, the world — that Amy Griffin is a fraud and a thief.”The lawsuit says that in the woman’s telling, “Mrs.Griffin stole the rape of another woman and built a bestseller on it.”A Times spokesperson said the lawsuit misrepresents its story and reporting.
The former classmate said her account will prove true in court.In “The Tell,” a hit that became an Oprah’s 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.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 in California state court, which Griffin is fighting and seeking to have dismissed.The Associated Press doesn’t 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 says documentation backs her in every aspectGriffin’s 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 intervie...