Amy Griffin is being sued by a former classmate over Griffin’s memoir The Tell, the New York Times reports. The lawsuit claims that Griffin took the classmate’s story of being sexually assaulted by a teacher and passed it off as her own in the bestselling book.
In Griffin’s memoir, published last March by Dial Press, the author writes about using MDMA-assisted therapy to uncover memories of sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher in an Amarillo, Texas, middle school in the late 1980s. A critic for Kirkus called the book “an important, wholly believable account of how long-buried but profoundly formative experiences finally emerge.”
The memoir was a pick for Oprah Winfrey’s book club and became a bestseller, drawing praise from admirers including Today show co-host Jenna Bush Hager, who called the memoir “important and courageous.”
Last September, the Times published a story that questioned the accuracy of Griffin’s book. Griffin’s editor at Dial Press, Whitney Frick, told the newspaper, “Book publishers are not investigators. This is Amy’s story. We trust her, and all of our authors, that they are recounting their memories truthfully.”
The lawsuit was filed in California by a plaintiff identified as Jane Doe. Named alongside Griffin in the suit are ghostwriter Sam Lansky and Dial Press. The lawsuit maintains that the sexual assault described by Griffin in fact happened to Doe and charges the defendants with invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress.
Thomas A. Clare, an attorney for Griffin, told the newsletter Publishers Lunch, “Just like the New York Times manufactured a false narrative about Amy Griffin and The Tell, it also engineered the premise for this absurd lawsuit.…We look forward to exposing these meritless claims in court, as well as the deeply flawed New York Times reporting that is at the center of it.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
