She turned her childhood sexual abuse into a bestseller. But was it her story to tell?

When Amy Griffin was 12 years old, a teacher at her school – one of her favourites; the one who told her she was the school’s real leader – sexually assaulted her. The abuse, which she details viscerally in her bestselling memoir, The Tell, happened multiple times throughout her time at middle school, and again when she was 16.

At the time, Griffin suppressed the memories to such an extent that as an adult – now a successful venture capitalist, married to a billionaire, living a seemingly perfect life – she had no recollection of it whatsoever. Until, encouraged by her husband, she tried illegal MDMA therapy, and all those hitherto suppressed memories came tumbling out.

“The first thing I remembered was my head hitting the wall,” she writes, detailing the school settings in Amarillo, Texas, where the abuse took place: in a bathroom, classroom, locker room, and under the benches in the sports area. “He raped me there, too.” He was violent – he beat her and threatened to rip out her teeth if she told anyone about the abuse.

Horrified by what her psyche had uncovered, and angered beyond belief that this had happened to her, Griffin sought to bring legal action against her alleged abuser (whom she doesn’t identify and, using a pseudonym, she calls Mr Mason). But the statute of limitations in Texas had expired, and a criminal case was impossible.

Instead, she wrote a book – a very successful one. The Tell was Oprah’s Book Club pick last year, and Griffin, who counts Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager as friends, was reportedly paid almost $US1 million as an advance. Since it came out in March 2025, The Tell has sold more than 100,000 copies and spent four weeks on the New York Times’s bestseller list. Griffin was interviewed on the book tour by Martha Stewart and Drew Barrymore (who dubbed the book a “literary masterpiece”), and was selected as one of Time magazine’s most influential people of that year. It’s all fitting vindication, you might think, for the abuse she experienced in her youth and the trauma which she managed to overcome.

Except, did she?

There have been whispers that Griffin has embellished, or even plagiarised, her life story. Some critics have questioned whether her use of drug-assisted therapy to reclaim decades-old memories is reliable. Others have suggested that an ordinary suburban school teacher is no match for a woman as wealthy as Griffin. Her husband, John, founded his own hedge fund, Blue Ridge Capital, which managed around $US9 billion at its peak, while Griffin’s G9 Ventures invests in female-led companies including dating app Bumble and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.

In September, The New York Times ran a hefty, heavily researched long-read on Griffin, 49, headlined “The Billionaire, the Psychedelics and the Best-Selling Memoir”. The piece featured interviews with Griffin’s former classmates in Amarillo, as well as local police, and assessed her original book proposal sent to publishers. Griffin writes in her memoir that, after undergoing the MDMA-assisted therapy, she “knew that these memories were real. My body knew what had happened to me. The way I’d shake when I’d tell my story; the way my eyes welled up with tears at the mention of Texas”. Her therapist told her they had “no reason to suspect that these are false or implanted memories”.

But the article found several points of contention. The scepticism mostly centred on an issue that Griffin herself acknowledges in the book – that “I had no way to confirm what I’d remembered. There was no smoking gun, no physical evidence, no tangible proof. There had been no witnesses.” She acknowledges that some people might find it hard to believe that she, a teenager by the time the abuse ended, had completely erased it from her memory. But, with the help of the MDMA therapy, “I didn’t think any of that… The compassion I felt for young Amy was absolute.”

Then came last week’s bombshell: Griffin is being sued by a former classmate who contends that the story of sexual abuse Griffin described in her book was not Griffin’s assault, but her own. The classmate shared with The New York Times detailed accounts of being abused – by a different teacher – in the same locations mentioned in Griffin’s book, including at a middle-school dance. The anonymous schoolmate has accused Griffin of invasion of privacy, negligence and infliction of emotional distress, among other things.

The lawsuit also names The Tell’s ghostwriter (Sam Lansky, who previously worked on Britney Spears’s headline-grabbing 2023 memoir The Woman in Me), as well as Penguin Random House and The Dial Press, which published the book.

The whole thing is now being dubbed America’s Salt Path scandal, given the alarming similarities to Raynor Winn’s allegedly unverified memoir, which chronicled her and her husband Moth’s experience walking the 630-mile South West Coast Path.

So does Griffin’s classmate have a case? And just how reliable is she as narrator of her own life?

Scroll through Griffin’s social media, and hers appears a pretty enviable existence, with posts depicting her in glamorous ski gear with Lindsey Vonn; in a shimmering strapless gown at the Met Gala; smiling during a visit to her alma mater, the University of Virginia. Griffin acknowledges in her book that her life is a privileged one. She and her husband have four children and live on Manhattan’s exclusive Upper East Side, in a townhouse they bought in 2019 for a reported $77 million, as well as owning homes in various locations that include the Bahamas and New Zealand. Last year, she attended the wedding of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Venice, Italy.

She is open about having grown up in a wealthy family (her grandparents founded a successful chain of convenience stores called Toot’n Totum in Amarillo) and acknowledges that when it comes to money, her life has been an easy one.

She grew up the quintessential southern belle in the sort of family where her mother would make her “put my hands straight down by my side in front of the mirror once I’d gotten dressed before heading to a party. If my fingertips were longer than the hem of my skirt, then it was too short and I’d wear something else.”

“Your mother was a virgin when I married her, and I expect you to be the same,” her father told her as a teenager. “It was bred into you, between school, church and southern morality, that a woman was meant to look pretty, take care of the kids and somehow maintain the appearance of chastity while doing it,” she writes.

As a young woman studying in London, she went on a date with a “suitable” boy introduced to her by her father – who, she says, proceeded to rape her (without her father’s knowledge). Later, she meets her husband, has her children and throws herself into giving them as good a life as possible – all while feeling, underneath, that something is off.

Despite her privileged life, Griffin makes a sympathetic narrator. There is much in her story that women will relate to: the invisible quest for perfection, which must also look effortless; the struggle to know how to define boundaries – or even to know what they are. I’m sure I’m not the only one left curious to know what illegal MDMA therapy might release in my own self after reading Griffin’s account.

She is an engaging writer, too – her story is well-told and very readable, if not quite a literary masterpiece.

And yet the psychedelic trip that “releases” the “memories” is a pivotal point in this tale: either you will continue to believe her, or you will start to doubt her side of the story. “There’s a difference between a memory that’s stored and a memory that’s recalled,” Griffin’s therapist explains. “You’re right that stressful and traumatic experiences tend to be stored very strongly… but… just because something is strongly stored in your memory doesn’t mean that it will be recalled later, or ever.” The trouble is, as multiple experts have pointed out, that generally speaking, MDMA therapy is thought to help patients process difficult memories, not recover them.

Griffin sought more definitive proof of the abuse to stop her “second guessing”: she hired a private investigator to dig into her former teacher, and tried to find other victims of his abuse – without success. Eventually, she decided to bring a case against him. “No one else has come forward but I’m moving forward regardless,” she writes. “I know what he did to me and that’s all that matters.” Her lawyer warned her that, as a wealthy woman, she risked her alleged abuser counter-suing her for defamation (her original book proposal named her alleged attacker, while some claim her depiction of him in the book made it possible for locals in Amarillo to identify him.)

But she thought there was no other option, writing “I need to validate my memories”. She ignores the multiple friends and family advising her to focus on her own healing and spend time processing what has happened to her. Justice, she writes, “is how I heal, for me and for everyone else who’s been through something like this”.

In response to the criticism swirling around the book, Whitney Frick, Griffin’s editor at the Dial Press, reportedly said “book publishers are not investigators”. But one would think, when an author is this high-profile, that more due diligence might be carried out.

The Tell will undoubtedly continue to sell well – not least because of the fresh scandal surrounding it. But whether it really has enabled Griffin to lay down the ghosts that haunt her is quite another matter. The book is an enjoyable read, but it raises far more questions than it answers.

The Telegraph, London