Amy Griffin, author of the memoir “The Tell,” filed a lawsuit Monday saying a childhood classmate defamed her with the accusation that she had appropriated her classmate’s own experience of sexual abuse and presented it as her own in the book.
Ms. Griffin’s lawsuit, which was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Nevada, accused the classmate of falsely portraying Ms. Griffin as a “fraud and a thief.”
It’s the latest legal twist surrounding the book, in which Griffin, a billionaire and philanthropist, describes sexual abuse at the hands of a school teacher while she was in high school in Texas in the 1980s. In the book, she says her memories of the abuse were recovered 30 years later while she was in therapy with MDMA, an illegal psychedelic drug.
Released in March 2025, “The Tell” became an instant bestseller. A first-time author, Griffin received help from a ghostwriter and extensive social media support from a network of famous friends and business partners.
The former classmate learned about “The Tell” after being contacted by reporters from 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 editorial charts.
The Times published an article in September 2025 under the title “The Billionaire, Psychedelics, and the Best-Selling Memoir.” In it, the classmate, who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity to maintain her privacy, said parts of Griffin’s book were strikingly similar to her own experience of being sexually assaulted at the high school 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 that highlighted two episodes from the book: an assault at a high school dance and another in the school bathroom, in which Griffin said the teacher tied her hands behind her back with a bandana. The classmate said those attacks had happened to her, but that Ms. Griffin had presented them as her own recovered memories.
The classmate told The Times in 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 with Ms. Griffin at a California coffee shop in 2019 to talk about her childhood in Texas.
However, in her own lawsuit filed this week, Griffin said the two women had not spoken since they attended school together 35 years ago.
Griffin said she began writing down her own memories of the abuse in 2020, long before the classmate publicly revealed her own experience.
Ms. Griffin has denied that any element of her experience or memory was fabricated and said in her lawsuit that “every element” of her former classmate’s allegations was “false.”
“‘The Tell’ chronicles Ms. Griffin’s own abuse,” Ms. Griffin’s lawsuit says.
An attorney for the classmate did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thomas A. Clare, Griffin’s attorney, said in an emailed statement that Griffin’s “accuser has had every opportunity to set the record straight.”
“The purpose of this lawsuit is to make the truth known,” Mr. Clare said. “The New York Times knowingly promoted its false accusations and must also be held accountable.”
Ms. Griffin’s lawsuit accuses the Times of publishing the classmate’s account in an attempt to discredit Ms. Griffin. The Times story “was a search for a reason not to believe ‘The Tell,’” the lawsuit says.
The Times disputed those allegations and defended its reporting.
“The filings repeatedly misrepresent the New York Times story and its reporting,” spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement. “Our story was about 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 only agenda of our journalists was to investigate the facts, including corroborating accounts from all sources,” he added.
