The billionaire author of a best-selling memoir about being sexually abused by a teacher has been sued by a classmate, alleging she stole her story in a bizarre plot.
Amy Griffin’s book The Tell claimed that she unearthed memories of being assaulted by a teacher in a Texas middle school in the 1980s when she took the drug MDMA 30 years later. It was pushed by Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, Spanx billionaire Sarah Blakely, Law & Order’s Mariska Hargitay, the CBS Mornings show, and most influentially of all, Oprah.
But now an unnamed woman has filed a suit in California alleging that “The Tell constitutes neither a genuine nor harmless memoir,” and in fact the “recovered” memories are not Griffin’s experiences, but hers. The New York Times was first to report on the suit.
The woman is suing Griffin, a billionaire thanks to her own investment career and marriage to a hedge fund founder, alleging that the author used an elaborate plot to steal her own traumatic sexual abuse then turn it into her memoir, which mixed fact and fiction, but was sold as being true.
The woman claims that Griffin connected with her years after they grew up together in Amarillo, Texas, and that three years later she got a call out of the blue from someone claiming to be a Hollywood talent agent, who said they had heard she had a “fascinating life” which could be turned into a book or movie. The purported talent agent spent hours speaking to her, and heard the woman’s horrific account of abuse when she was at school.
The lawsuit says that two alleged incidents described in heartbreaking detail in the book—one that involved Griffin saying hands being tied behind her back with a bandanna, then being sexually assaulted by her teacher in a bathroom at school, and another when the same teacher was said to have sexually abused her at a dance—were actually the experiences which the woman had confided in the “talent agent.”
The woman alleged that when the teacher abused her at the dance she was wearing a dress she borrowed from Griffin, for the evening. She later returned the dress to Griffin, stained. The woman who is suing said she their childhoods could not be more different: Griffin’s father was a retail CEO, while the woman grew up in a children’s home and a foster home.
But the woman says she discovered that the talent agent was fake, and alleges that they were actually a front for Griffin to gather material for her memoir.
The lawsuit comes almost a year after the book was first published, and in the wake of an explosive Times article which revealed questions over the truth of the book, and how Griffin claimed she had “recovered” the memories during therapy which involved micro-dosing the party drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy—a practice in which her husband’s fund was investing at the time.
The Times originally reported that Griffin had written about someone who was clearly identifiable, that local law enforcement had appealed for other people to come forward if they had been abused, but that none had.
In her lawsuit the woman said she only discovered her story had apparently been stolen when she was contacted by the Times and read the book.
Griffin, who is married with four children and lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in the Hamptons, canceled publicity when the first story was published. Paltrow and Witherspoon had both promoted her book while she had invested in their ventures including Goop and Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, and profited from their success.
Griffin appears to be preparing to fight the suit. Her attorney Tom Clare—who has also represented Sarah Palin, fallen Harvard president Claudine Gay, and Trump-loving hedge fund founder Bill Ackman—said, “After two New York Times reporters instigated this whole situation by bringing the book to her attention, the Plaintiff made her own choice to publicize her narrative to a global audience by acting as the principal source for (and being photographed in) a New York Times article. 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.”
The Daily Beast has also contacted Penguin for comment.
