Amy Griffin Sues Classmate for Defamation Over 2025 Memoir Appropriation Claim
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Jun 16
Amy Griffin Sues Classmate for Defamation Over 2025 Memoir Appropriation Claim
3 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Jun 16
Summary
Amy Griffin filed a defamation suit Monday in U.S. District Court in Nevada, accusing a childhood classmate of falsely claiming Griffin stole her sexual-abuse story for the memoir “The Tell.”
The lawsuit says the accusation portrayed Griffin as “a fraud and a thief” after the classmate alleged that parts of the book mirrored her own assault experience at their Texas middle school in the 1980s.
Published in March 2025, “The Tell” became an instant best seller and drew added scrutiny because Griffin wrote that she recovered memories of the abuse 30 years later during MDMA-assisted therapy.
The dispute surfaced after New York Times reporters contacted the classmate in summer 2025; the newspaper later detailed her allegations in a September 2025 article, setting up the latest legal turn around the memoir.