Source : PERTHNOW NEWS
US author Amy Griffin is suing a former classmate for defamation, 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”.
Griffin’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Nevada on Monday, 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 recounts being sexually abused as a child by a teacher at her middle school in 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.
Griffin says documentation backs her in every aspect
Griffin’s lawsuit says the most essential fact is that she put her account of her abuse in writing in 2020, and in 2021 provided another detailed account in an interview with the Amarillo Police Department.
Both accounts match up with the book, and both came before Griffin is alleged to have extracted the woman’s abuse story by having someone posing as a talent agent call her in 2022, according to the lawsuit. The statute of limitations prevented the criminal investigation from moving forward.
Griffin’s lawsuit says the woman falsely claimed to be another middle school classmate who appears in The Tell under the pseudonym “Claudia”, whose meeting with the author is recounted in the book.
The lawsuit said Griffin had not talked to the woman in more than 35 years, had never been part of the same church youth group as alleged, and was demonstrably not in the Palm Springs area in 2019 – or the years before or after – when the woman claims the two of them met for coffee.
Griffin’s lawsuit says the coffee shop conversation with “Claudia” took place thousands of kilometres away in the presence of a collaborator, and that the woman in the Times story had been unable to produce any evidence the meeting with her had taken place.
“Amy Griffin’s accuser has had every opportunity to set the record straight,” Griffin’s lawyer Tom Clare said in a statement to the AP on Tuesday.
In an email to The Associated Press sent through her lawyers, the woman said the shame and humiliation from her sexual assault were unimaginable and she was “violated all over again after reading about my own experiences in Amy’s book”.
New York Times stands by its reporting and story.
