See All<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nSix months before, Amy had published a memoir, The Tell, revealing that she\u2019d spent decades running \u2014 often literally \u2014 from some dark, unknown secret in her past, something \u201clocked away,\u201d and that, at 44, with the help of MDMA therapy, she\u2019d recovered memories of being sexually assaulted by one of her middle-school teachers. Amy had come from a well-off and attentive family in Amarillo, Texas. But as she recalled it, the abuse, brutal and cruel, had gone on for years, from when she was 12 to 16, and never been discovered. In the book, Amy describes her head hitting the wall of the school bathroom and the teacher tying her hands together with a bandanna. She remembers her face against yellow tiles; the man, in cowboy boots, stepping on her back. She writes of being raped in a classroom on the night of a Sadie Hawkins dance, recalling that she wore a \u201cpoofy\u201d floral dress, borrowed from a family friend and as heavy as a curtain; that it was pulled over her head, blocking out the light. The teacher is given the pseudonym Mr. Mason. \u201cIf you tell anyone,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019ll rip your teeth out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The process of remembering and writing had been difficult. Some days, Amy says, she curled up on the floor weeping. John would bring coffee and sit with her. But she\u2019d achieved something significant. The book garnered a nearly $1 million advance, all of which she would be donating to organizations fighting sexual violence. It debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list.<\/p>\n
The rollout was extravagant. The launch, at the Ford Foundation, felt like a gala. Celebrity attendees included Gayle King, Christy Turlington, and Karlie Kloss; some guests were seated in the 170-person auditorium, while others were divided into satellite rooms, where they could watch by livestream. Griffin wore a gold suit; Oprah joined her onstage, a surprise \u201cspecial friend.\u201d There was, one guest remarked, \u201cmore security than for the Obamas.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
\n At the launch of The Tell with Oprah Winfrey.
\n Photo: Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
At each subsequent tour appearance, there was another famous and powerful woman: Sheryl Sandberg, Drew Barrymore, Martha Stewart. The Tell was selected for Oprah\u2019s Book Club and landed Griffin a spot on the 2025 Time \u201c 100 Most Influential People\u201d list \u2014 in an accompanying essay, her close friend Reese Witherspoon called her \u201ca beacon for women everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
The day before the memoir was released, in March 2025, Amy had received an email from a reporter at the Times whom she knew casually. He suggested they talk about a potential story. She connected him to her PR team and left for the tour. But by May, she was hearing from well-connected friends that the Times was working on \u201ca hit piece\u201d; there were rumors that reporters were digging into her story. In June, Amy began getting phone calls from friends back in Amarillo: A Times reporter was in town interviewing former classmates. She soon learned the paper had obtained a copy of her book proposal, which in error included two mentions of her alleged abuser\u2019s real last name; the reporter was asking around about the teacher and trying to speak to him. \u201cIt feels,\u201d Amy wrote in her journal at the time, \u201clike they are slowly chipping away at my story. I feel like a small piece of me dies over and over again every time someone from home reaches out to me.\u201d In July, without informing Amy, the Times reached out to another man named in the proposal, a family friend who she\u2019d written had abused her as a child. (In a comment, the Times said, \u201cHad the reporters been afforded access to Griffin, they would have been able to ask her directly about this man.\u201d) She became so anxious, she says, her hair started falling out, and she and John decided to hire the defamation firm Clare Locke, known for quashing stories on behalf of powerful clients.<\/p>\n
In August, one of Amy\u2019s new lawyers called and told her the Times had found, as she recalls it, \u201canother survivor\u201d with a similar story. Amy was in her bedroom in the Griffins\u2019 Upper East Side apartment on the tenth floor of a Romanesque building overlooking Central Park. She felt sick and relieved. As the Times dug into her world, she says, she\u2019d \u201cfelt like I was a hostage. It was like I was being released.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amy had searched for other victims and any concrete evidence of her abuse for years. In late 2020, she hired the corporate-intelligence firms Exiger and Kroll to act as private investigators. She called old classmates. In August 2021, she brought her allegations to the Amarillo police department and attempted to press charges, only to learn the statute of limitations in Texas had passed. She\u2019d found, as she writes in The Tell, \u201cno smoking gun, no physical evidence, no tangible proof.\u201d For days, the thought of another survivor would not leave her mind. She cried for what this woman must have endured, and she drafted her a letter.<\/p>\n
The Griffins\u2019 trip to Virginia was just a few weeks later. Back at the farmhouse, John stiffened up. He said he had to tell her something. An email had arrived from the Times. It was a fact-checking document, a list of claims the paper planned to publish, 11 pages long. It said the Griffins would have about four days to confirm, refute, or otherwise respond.<\/p>\n
Amy and John sat together on a small couch in their wood-paneled study. She listened as he read aloud from his iPad, scanning through the first page of the document. The Tell, the reporters wrote, had been \u201can instant sensation,\u201d but it had \u201cbecome the subject of skepticism\u201d \u2014 that skepticism, they said, was \u201cnow spilling into the public.\u201d Then, at the bottom of the page, John read: \u201cWe report that a middle school classmate of yours shared \u2026 detailed accounts of being attacked \u2014 by a different teacher \u2014 in several of the same locations, including at the same middle-school dance \u2026 Her accounts raise questions about your recovered memories.\u201d<\/p>\n
John continued over the next seven pages, the claims accumulating into something amorphous but heavy:<\/p>\n
MDMA is an illegal hallucinogen that the Food and Drug Administration declined to approve \u2026<\/p>\n
Our review shows that you liberally changed details \u2026<\/p>\n
The scope of your family\u2019s wealth is not included \u2026<\/p>\n
A complaint was not filed against him during his 30-year career.<\/p>\n
On the eighth page, the reporters returned to the classmate. \u201cThe classmate,\u201d they wrote, \u201chas clear memories that dovetail with central anecdotes\u201d from The Tell. \u201cThe classmate wonders if you were aware as a child of the abuse she was suffering and whether you have appropriated her experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amy thought of her daughters, who\u2019d been so proud of her, who\u2019d described her as lighter, more present since telling them the truth about her life. She remembered her teacher\u2019s words as he\u2019d assaulted her in the school bathroom: \u201cYou come from one of the nicest families in town. No one will believe you.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n With Mariska Hargitay.
\n Photo: Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bcd284a92a783a3bce480984c189bea687-drew-.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n On The Drew Barrymore Show.
\n Photo: The Drew Barrymore Show\n <\/p>\n
In July, I met Griffin at the Whitby Hotel in an eighth-floor suite. Thick off-white drapes veiled a terrace overlooking 56th Street. We were only a couple of blocks from the offices of Griffin\u2019s investment fund, G9 Ventures, which had a better view \u2014 of Central Park \u2014 but she\u2019d wanted something more intimate.<\/p>\n
At 50, Griffin\u2019s face is smooth. She is tall and thin and was dressed in all white, her blonde hair parted down the middle and hanging over a thin cashmere sweater. She wore a silver-and-turquoise belt buckle \u2014 a nod to Texas. She nervously adjusted the placement of our salads: organic chicken with sliced bok choy, cabbage, and avocado and sides of turkey meatballs. She\u2019d ordered from Goop Kitchen, owned by her close friend Gwyneth Paltrow.<\/p>\n
We sat on an English roll-arm sofa. Her publicist \u2014 a crisis expert she\u2019d hired in March \u2014 and one of her defamation lawyers sat nearby; the lawyer, who had said she could not discuss the case, would have preferred the meeting were not taking place at all.<\/p>\n
Griffin stretched her arms behind her, as if preparing for a race. An alarm blared over the hotel intercom, followed by an announcement that it was a test of the fire system. \u201cIs there some sort of sign in that?\u201d she asked, laughing.<\/p>\n
After the Times\u2019 fact-checking email, the Griffin camp had gone into overdrive, hoping to stop the article. One of her lawyers, Tom Clare, threatened to sue the paper, at one point claiming \u201cthe mere sending\u201d of the fact-checking document \u201chad caused additional trauma and extreme physical and emotional harm to a survivor of sexual assault.\u201d He wrote that the Times had been \u201cduped by a fabulist.\u201d Sources inside the paper and close to the Griffins say their friend Darren Walker, then the president of the Ford Foundation, called the editor of the Times, Joe Kahn, to ask that he personally take a close look at the planned story. It was to no avail; according to Times insiders, Kahn loved it.<\/p>\n
It was published on the front page in late September. The reporters wrote that they had found \u201cnotable omissions\u201d in Griffin\u2019s memoir, including that the Griffins\u2019 foundation had invested in a pharmaceutical company focused on developing therapeutic MDMA and that John had donated $1 million to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit research group that has funded clinical trials of MDMA therapy for PTSD patients.<\/p>\n
As for Amy\u2019s former classmate, the reporters wrote, \u201cSome of the descriptions \u2026 of Ms. Griffin\u2019s being assaulted are eerily similar to the abuse she herself endured, she said. She has since retained a lawyer.\u201d The anonymous woman had told the paper not only that she was assaulted the night of the same dance \u2014 in a supply closet, rather than a classroom \u2014 but that she too had been wearing a borrowed dress; hers, she said, belonged to Griffin. She alleged that she had been assaulted by a different teacher than the one Griffin described.<\/p>\n
The article did not state outright that Griffin had \u201cappropriated\u201d the classmate\u2019s story, as the fact-check suggested it might. But taken as a whole, the Times seemed to be mounting an argument for Griffin\u2019s wrongdoing. (In a statement, the Times denied that it had accused Griffin of appropriating anyone else\u2019s story or implied it. \u201cWe followed the facts over several months, sought corroboration, and published what we were able to confirm.\u201d) The paper emphasized the uncertainty of Griffin\u2019s MDMA-recovered account in her memoir as potentially \u201csymbolic,\u201d laden with \u201cnotable omissions,\u201d and \u201cnot fact-checked\u201d and juxtaposed it with her classmate\u2019s \u201cclear memories.\u201d The two women\u2019s lives were portrayed in opposition, as if the privileges of Griffin\u2019s life were connected, somehow, to the classmate\u2019s struggles. \u201cThis summer,\u201d they wrote, \u201cwhile Ms. Griffin traveled to the Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, the classmate worked for $21 an hour as a home aide to an Alzheimer\u2019s patient.\u201d In middle school, the classmate faced \u201cprofound abuse and transience\u201d and \u201cstrove for acceptance by the popular girls,\u201d while \u201cMs. Griffin, their leader, treated her with distant benevolence.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like the Times wanted me to be a symbol of something,\u201d Griffin told me. Until now, she had not spoken publicly about the article. Everyone she trusted told her to wait it out: her new lawyers; her neighbor Diane Sawyer; Senator Cory Booker, an old friend of John\u2019s. Griffin said, \u201cPeople just kept saying to me, like, \u2018No one\u2019s going to care.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt ashamed all over again,\u201d she said. \u201cBut for something that wasn\u2019t true.\u201d People compared her to James Frey, another Oprah\u2019s Book Club author, infamous for concocting a best-selling memoir. But the idea of what she could have done was worse. The implication wasn\u2019t just that she might be a liar, but that she had stolen someone else\u2019s pain.<\/p>\n
In the weeks following the article, Griffin said, \u201cI couldn\u2019t function, and I didn\u2019t know what to do. I was completely empty, gone, disconnected from my joy and the life I built.\u201d She didn\u2019t want to see or talk to anyone outside her family. She rarely went into the office. \u201cI shuffled my feet,\u201d she said, \u201ctrying to get out of bed. I shuffled to the bathroom to take a bath. And I\u2019d be like, Okay, water, warm, that feels good. I\u2019d do that three or four times a day, and then I\u2019d say, I have to eat.\u201d She said she was hit with a series of respiratory infections, and in October, she got pneumonia.<\/p>\n
Yet she managed to maintain her high-profile public life. In late October, she posted to Instagram from the court at the Barclays Center; she\u2019d just become a part owner of the New York Liberty. In December, she co-chaired the Met\u2019s annual Art & Artists Gala.<\/p>\n
Then, in March, almost six months after the Times story, when Griffin was in Paris for Fashion Week, the unnamed classmate filed a lawsuit against her; her ghostwriter, Sam Lansky; and her publisher, Penguin Random House, and imprint, the Dial Press, asking for unspecified damages. The suit asserted that Griffin had \u201cfabricated\/lifted multiple key events\u201d from her classmate\u2019s life, including \u201cthe specific details\u201d of two sexual assaults by a middle-school teacher: the assault at the Sadie Hawkins dance and another \u201cmore violent\u201d assault in a school bathroom. All defendants were charged with invasion of privacy, the \u201cpublication of private facts,\u201d and the infliction of emotional distress.<\/p>\n
Though her friends and colleagues told her they believed her, the suit seemed to confirm to the broader public that she was a fraud. Her Instagram was flooded with angry comments: \u201cMore like Amy Grifter\u201d; \u201cBillionaires are so bored they need to buy someone else\u2019s memories\u201d; \u201cI hope you get sued into oblivion.\u201d Some were outraged by the idea of the psychedelic therapy: \u201cShame on you for destroying a man with your extremely shoddy science.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few weeks after the lawsuit was filed, Griffin\u2019s team received an email from her editor at Dial, Whitney Frick: The paperback edition of The Tell, scheduled to be released in four months, would be put on hold \u201cuntil more is resolved on the legal front.\u201d Frick said she would be back in touch in the fall.<\/p>\n
In June, Griffin filed her own lawsuit charging her former classmate \u2014 now her accuser \u2014 with defamation. The filing accused the woman \u2014 identified publicly for the first time as Joleene Altum \u2014 of falsely advancing the idea, in the Times, that Griffin \u201cstole the rape of another woman\u201d and painted her as a \u201cfraud and a thief.\u201d Now, it said, Altum was \u201cseeking to capitalize on the harm the Times article had already caused,\u201d further defaming her.<\/p>\n
It was in fact Altum, the lawyers wrote, who had stolen Griffin\u2019s story. Griffin was also seeking unspecified damages, but she would drop the suit entirely if, as her lawyers put it, Altum \u201ctells the truth publicly and plainly.\u201d<\/p>\n
During our lunch, Griffin seemed to be looking for a way to convey her rage without agitating her lawyers. Key to Altum\u2019s suit was the claim that she and Griffin had met as adults in 2019, the year before Griffin first took MDMA. This was completely false, Griffin said. \u201cI don\u2019t know Joleene Altum,\u201d she told me. She didn\u2019t remember her at all \u2014 not from middle school or any time after.<\/p>\n
Among Altum\u2019s more complicated claims was the idea that she was represented in The Tell as a character named Claudia: that is, that she appears in the book as both Griffin \u2014 having suffered the assaults Griffin describes \u2014 and someone else entirely. Claudia, another classmate, is a key figure in the memoir. The day after Griffin\u2019s first dose of MDMA, Claudia is one of the first people she thinks of, recalling that she lent the \u201csweet girl\u201d a dress. She comes to believe Claudia may be the person who can best corroborate the story of Mr. Mason\u2019s abuse.<\/p>\n
\u201cJoleene is not \u2018Claudia,\u2019\u201d Griffin told me. \u201cAll of it, all of it, is lies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Long before the article in the New York Times, The Tell was the subject of aggressive gossip and speculation in Griffin\u2019s Park Avenue social world. From the moment it was released, as an acquaintance put it, \u201cpeople were talking about it literally everywhere \u2014 galas, dinners, the Hamptons. And the question always was: Do you believe her?\u201d<\/p>\n
Griffin and her publisher had anticipated some skepticism. Though experts agree that it\u2019s possible for people to recall, with basic accuracy, events they haven\u2019t thought about in a long time, recovered memories can also be unreliable, and they have notoriously led, in some high-profile cases, to false accounts of childhood sexual abuse. As for MDMA, though it\u2019s been studied as a treatment for PTSD for more than 20 years, it\u2019s still far better known as a party drug.<\/p>\n
But Griffin\u2019s team did not seem to have anticipated how people\u2019s feelings about her would affect the reception. Amy Griffin, who owns at least five extravagant homes around the world; Amy, who is not just a wife but a financial power broker; Amy, who competes in triathlons, who in photographs with Paltrow looks like her sister. Now, she was supposedly an accomplished author too. \u201cI think the feeling was,\u201d a close friend of Griffin\u2019s told me, \u201cYou can\u2019t be that rich and that beautiful and that perfect \u2014 there\u2019s got to be something wrong.\u201d For those primed to see it, the book\u2019s ostentatious rollout had signaled artifice, and the memoir\u2019s success seemed predetermined.<\/p>\n
In Lansky, Griffin had chosen an experienced collaborator to help her turn hundreds of pages of notes into a salable product. A former Time journalist, Lansky was one of the ghostwriters of Britney Spears\u2019s blockbuster 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me. And like that memoir, The Tell was fast-paced, propulsive, novelistic. Yet early readers noted it could also be oddly frictionless, speeding through key moments, skating over ambiguity. One journalist who attended the launch described it as feeling \u201cweirdly weightless for a book about something so heavy.\u201d The narrative moved somewhat out of time \u2014 there were few dates to orient the reader \u2014 and the dialogue could feel polished to the point of contrived. \u201cThe prose,\u201d said one memoirist who has friends in common with Griffin, \u201cis too slick.\u201d<\/p>\n
The criticism repeated most often was that there was something off about Griffin\u2019s basic story \u2014 of buried memories suddenly returning after one session of MDMA therapy. It seemed both too tidy and far-fetched. \u201cHow,\u201d an acquaintance of Griffin asked, \u201cdo you go from no memory whatsoever to, like, remembering the smell of his leather belt?\u201d<\/p>\n
In Griffin\u2019s extended circle, speculation about her motives could be vicious. \u201cShe wanted to be more than just a pretty billionaire\u2019s wife,\u201d said a society publicist.<\/p>\n
After the Times article and Altum\u2019s lawsuit, some casual friends believed she\u2019d stolen the story. \u201cMaybe she was jealous that everyone else had trauma,\u201d said one, an Upper East Sider.<\/p>\n
Her closest friends thought this was all a lot of static. \u201cI think we have a bit of a humiliation fetish for successful women,\u201d said one. She was the first person Griffin had called after her initial MDMA session. The whole idea made no sense, she said: \u201cWhy the fuck would she do that to herself?\u201d<\/p>\n
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Photo: Elinor Carucci for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
In retrospect, the way the New York Times crafted its story on Griffin was confusing. Did the paper have some evidence of wrongdoing on Griffin\u2019s part that it had not included but felt comfortable insinuating? Or had it just collected more evidence of abuse at the same school?<\/p>\n
Griffin is certain the reporters were committed to finding fault with her account from the beginning. In the lawsuit against Altum, Griffin\u2019s lawyers devote considerable space to excoriating the Times, writing that the reporters \u201cembarked on a months-long fishing expedition aimed at smearing Mrs. Griffin.\u201d They allege that Katherine Rosman, a correspondent on the \u201cMetro\u201d desk, and her co-author, Elisabeth Egan, a features writer who covers books and the publishing industry, \u201cspent four months combing Mrs. Griffin\u2019s hometown\u201d and \u201casking leading questions designed to elicit doubt.\u201d (I was previously an editor and writer for the Times, and I have worked with both Rosman and Egan.) The lawyers also claim, offering no direct attribution, that Rosman told a source, at some unspecified time and place, that she \u201ccould not believe that the child of a wealthy family could be violently abused without anyone noticing.\u201d In a comment, the Times said, \u201cWe reject any notion of a preconceived narrative or pursuing reporting with any agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n
The story started out at the \u201cStyles\u201d desk, where elite Manhattan chatter is writers\u2019 bread and butter. The first reporter to contact Griffin was Jacob Bernstein, who often profiles society figures and people mired in scandal. (I have worked with Bernstein at the Times and elsewhere.) Sources inside the Times say Bernstein chose not to pursue the story after reading the book because he thought Griffin\u2019s claims would be too difficult to either substantiate or disprove. It was in May, after Bernstein walked away from the story, that Rosman and Egan teamed up to pursue it.<\/p>\n
Griffin believes the reporters were influenced by the din of gossip around the book, and maybe they were. But there were other angles of interest: that a wealthy first-time author had seemed to leverage her rolodex to create a best seller, that she was relying on memories recovered through drug therapy, that her alleged abuser was probably easily identifiable, and that she had admitted to finding no corroborating evidence. The editor eventually assigned to the story seemed to give Griffin\u2019s claims credence from the beginning, believing her account might signal a much larger sexual-abuse scandal at the school.<\/p>\n
When Rosman first reached out to Griffin\u2019s team requesting an interview, she wrote that she and Egan wanted to pursue \u201ctwo main lines-of-questions\u201d: how the book had become such a success and what had happened in Amarillo \u201cto Amy and presumably other children.\u201d Griffin can quote the last part of their message by heart: They would use her book as a \u201cguide to learn all we can and verify everything we can.\u201d The reporters repeatedly asked to talk; Griffin wouldn\u2019t speak to them on the record.<\/p>\n
That June, Rosman flew to Amarillo. She requested records from the Amarillo school district, the state education department, and the police. The reporters interviewed the detective sergeant who\u2019d recorded Griffin\u2019s account in 2021, and they spoke with dozens of people around Amarillo. They were particularly interested in finding Claudia and had a copy of Griffin\u2019s book proposal, in which Claudia was described as being in foster care and living in \u201ca group home.\u201d Cold-calling through the middle school\u2019s yearbooks from that era, they eventually reached Altum, who\u2019d lived in a group home and been in and out of foster care.<\/p>\n
In the article, the reporters write that Altum told them she was \u201cunfamiliar\u201d with The Tell when they first contacted her. Then, \u201cafter she was mailed a copy of the memoir and read it, she said she was deeply unnerved.\u201d This seemed to allow for the possibility that it was Altum who had lifted details from Griffin\u2019s story \u2014 that \u201conly after reading it,\u201d as Griffin\u2019s lawyer later put it, \u201cdid Ms. Altum claim the story as her own.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response to questions, the Times said that Altum had recalled her abuse in precise detail before being sent the book. If the reporters did in fact have Altum remembering the specifics of the Sadie Hawkins dance before reading the book, why would they exclude such an important fact?<\/p>\n
In a statement, the Times disputed that there was any slant in how it presented its reporting, writing, \u201cWe left it to readers to decide what to make of the situation.\u201d It also wrote, \u201cUnlike the Amy Griffin character in The Tell, Ms. Altum had not relied on psychedelics to remember that she was abused, and she had discussed the abuse with family and friends over the decades.\u201d The Times declined to make Rosman and Egan available for comment.<\/p>\n
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\n Joleene Altum, left, and Amy Griffin in eighth grade. Altum and Griffin attended Stephen F. Austin Middle School in 1990. Years later, they both stated they were sexually assaulted by different teachers at the school. Photo: Stephen F. Austin Middle School.\n <\/p>\n
\n Joleene Altum, left, and Amy Griffin in eighth grade. Altum and Griffin attended Stephen F. Austin Middle School in 1990. Years later, they both state… more
\n Joleene Altum, left, and Amy Griffin in eighth grade. Altum and Griffin attended Stephen F. Austin Middle School in 1990. Years later, they both stated they were sexually assaulted by different teachers at the school. Photo: Stephen F. Austin Middle School.\n <\/p>\n
In August, I met Joleene Altum at her home in suburban Las Vegas, a two-story stucco house owned by her close friends, who are often on the road. Out back was a kidney-shaped in-ground swimming pool and a pond. A small platform stage was set up facing the pool. Altum and her housemates are hobbyist musicians and Jimmy Buffett fans \u2014 she\u2019s a singer and the president of a local Parrothead Club. Inside, the place was decked out in \u201cMargaritaville\u201d paraphernalia; the house\u2019s entryway was painted with tropical birds.<\/p>\n
Altum was warm, though nervous, a little shaky. She wore a pale-blue two-piece set, silky pants and a blouse, and her chin-length blonde hair was tucked behind her ears. Her face had gentle lines, and her voice was very soft, almost childlike.<\/p>\n
She first met Griffin, according to her lawsuit, in 1988 or 1989, when both were students at Stephen F. Austin Middle School in Amarillo. During that period, Altum was living in the local Presbyterian Children\u2019s Home; her parents were drug addicts and alcoholics, she said, so she had been in the system from birth. She was in and out of foster care and ran away a few times; the first time, she told me, was shortly after the eighth-grade dance. In her sophomore year of high school, she ran away for good and began living on her own.<\/p>\n
Altum\u2019s accusations against Griffin are complex and sometimes hard to follow, and on the advice of her lawyer, who joined us via her iPhone, she would not discuss anything connected to the legal battle. In her lawsuit and related filings, Altum describes the dress Griffin allegedly lent her for the Sadie Hawkins dance as \u201cfloral, puffy\u201d and notes that, in The Tell, Griffin recounts lending a \u201cfloral\u201d dress with \u201cpuffy sleeves\u201d to Claudia. (Griffin makes clear in the memoir that it was for a different dance, cotillion.) This matches Griffin\u2019s description \u2014 in both her memoir and her 2021 police report \u2014 of the dress she herself was wearing on the same night to the Sadie Hawkins dance, when she says she was raped. Altum says in a sworn declaration that she was \u201cexcited and grateful that Amy was willing to lend me one of her dresses, because I did not have many nice clothes of my own.\u201d Residents of the children\u2019s home, a filing says, were not allowed to borrow clothes from other children.<\/p>\n
Altum states that she returned Griffin\u2019s dress to her, \u201cstill stained with bodily fluids,\u201d in a plastic bag before a meeting of the two girls\u2019 church youth group. (Griffin and her mother, Julie Mitchell, say Griffin wasn\u2019t a part of any church group in those years. Earlier, Altum had told the New York Times the meeting took place at Griffin\u2019s house.)<\/p>\n
Altum claims that she had \u201cno meaningful contact\u201d with Griffin \u201cfor decades\u201d after middle school but that in 2019 Griffin called and asked if they could meet for coffee; Griffin was going to be in her area. Altum was living in Morongo Valley then \u2014 a tiny town outside Joshua Tree, where she\u2019d raised two children. She says she and Griffin met in Palm Springs, about 30 minutes away, in a \u201cboutique coffee shop.\u201d<\/p>\n
The purpose of this alleged meeting is unclear. That day, the suit says, Altum and Griffin talked about growing up around Amarillo and attending the same summer camp; about their shared love of Taco Villa, a local chain; and about Griffin\u2019s work \u2014 Griffin, it claims, referred to herself \u201cas a \u2018girlboss\u2019\u201d and told Altum \u201cshe was one, too.\u201d But according to Altum, the two did not speak about sexual abuse in any form: She did not tell Griffin what had happened to her. Altum writes that she understood the meeting as simply \u201ca personal reconnection with someone from the past.\u201d She says the two women never spoke again.<\/p>\n
Then, around April 2022, she alleges, she received a phone call from a man identifying himself as Dominique, without a last name, who claimed to be a talent agent and producer. \u201cHe had heard from an unidentified third party that she had led a fascinating life,\u201d her suit says; he was supposedly interested in turning her story into a movie. In her filings, Altum has submitted a phone number once registered to a Dominique Price who was a contestant on Temptation Island in 2019 \u2014 a 30-something content creator and recruiter. In her lawsuit, Altum says she and the man spoke a few times a week for a month, spending hours on the phone each time. She says, in the filings, that along with the rest of her life story, she gave him a detailed account of being sexually assaulted in middle school by a teacher. When she asked for a contract, she says, the man disappeared.<\/p>\n
Altum ultimately alleges that \u201cDominique\u201d was \u201cacting as an agent\u201d for Griffin, or Lansky, and that he was working to extract the details of her abuse story so Griffin could publish them as her own. But in a sworn affidavit, Price says he had never met or heard of Griffin until the summer of 2025. That was when he was contacted by the New York Times. It is not clear what the Times knew about Price\u2019s connection to Altum\u2019s story. In his affidavit, he says the paper asked him if he was \u201cfamiliar with a specific woman whose name I did not recognize.\u201d The Times reporters did not mention Price in their story.<\/p>\n
In her own lawsuit, Griffin says that she has never met Altum as an adult and specifically that the Palm Springs meeting never took place. Her lawyers point to flight logs of her private jet showing she did not fly to Palm Springs in 2019. Griffin\u2019s lawyers, in their suit, claim Altum \u201chas essentially conceded that she does not possess a single document, communication, photograph, or receipt substantiating the meeting at the center of her account.\u201d Altum\u2019s lawyer noted that discovery period had only just begun.<\/p>\n
In conversation, Griffin calls Altum\u2019s claims absurd, and her lawyers point out that the timing of Dominique\u2019s alleged calls makes it impossible. Griffin had already spoken to the Amarillo Police Department \u2014 to Sergeant Gordon Eatley \u2014 describing her assaults in great detail, and had been recorded in a lengthy transcript, eight months before the calls between Price and Altum would have taken place.<\/p>\n
In Griffin\u2019s conversation with Eatley, lasting roughly two hours, she recalls the cicadas in the park on the evening of the school dance and the walk with her teacher to his classroom door, knowing what was coming. She remembers her dress \u2014 with \u201cpoofy sleeves\u201d; pink and yellow and floral \u2014 pushed over the top of her head, much as she described it in The Tell. She remembers the contested incident in the bathroom and falling against the stall; the teacher on top of her under the bleachers; that he made her feel they were breaking the rules together, like they were \u201cconnected\u201d: \u201cIt was us doing something, not him doing something to me.\u201d (The man Griffin alleges abused her did not respond to repeated attempts to reach him.)<\/p>\n
In the same report, Griffin also recounts being assaulted on her knees in \u201ca janitor\u2019s closet\u201d on the school\u2019s second floor \u2014 an incident not included in The Tell. She can see a mop and bucket and cleaning supplies. It is almost impossible that Altum could have seen this report before speaking to the Times and narrating her own assault in the \u201csupply closet.\u201d Further, Altum\u2019s claim of being sexually assaulted at the school dance, independent of her accusations against Griffin, has been supported in court declarations by two people who say they were aware of the incident at the time. One person, a close friend who lived at the children\u2019s home, says he saw her disappear from the dance with the teacher in question. Another, who also lived at the group home, says she later helped Altum try to scrub a stain off a \u201cfluffy floral dress.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sitting on the couch in her living room, Altum told me it had taken her a long time to read The Tell. When she finally got to the passages about the assaults, she had to put the book down. It was a \u201cgut punch,\u201d she said. \u201cI was thinking, I can\u2019t be reading this. I don\u2019t even know how to explain it.\u201d She was looking down as she spoke, tears in the corners of her eyes. \u201cThere were no good feelings, no good moments.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a subsequent phone call with Altum and her lawyer, I asked when she had come to see the book as the story of her own abuse. Did she ever think maybe it had happened to Griffin too?<\/p>\n
Altum went again to the feeling of it: \u201cIt was the most bizarre \u2014 \u201d<\/p>\n
Her lawyer interrupted: \u201cLet\u2019s leave it at that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, I pressed Griffin on the parallel question: Putting aside Altum\u2019s accusations against her \u2014 putting aside Palm Springs, Price, and all of her claims about the memoir \u2014 did she believe Altum could be telling the truth about her own assaults? Her lawsuit states that she \u201ctakes no position on whether Mrs. Altum has been sexually abused.\u201d Griffin eventually answered in writing: \u201cI hope she finds healing from any trauma she has experienced in life. I can only say with certainty that I did not know of or steal her account of abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Griffin remains adamant she is telling the truth about her assaults. But the book does contain fictions. Many are small and innocuous; some are relatively standard for a memoir. There were, for example, composite scenes \u2014 various events or conversations compressed into one. In one, Griffin discusses the nature of memory with her therapist. It was, as Lansky put it in a comment on the in-progress draft, \u201ca way to educate the reader.\u201d<\/p>\n
Griffin wanted the memoir to be, as she put it, \u201cuniversal.\u201d Her real goal, she told me, was to write something \u201cpeople would check out of libraries in 20 years and put on school curriculums.\u201d To this end, and contrary to the conventional wisdom of what makes a great and lasting \u2014 and universal \u2014 book, she and Lansky decided to remove particularities. Together, they scrubbed references to COVID and other markers of the time period, including the Trump presidency, and sanded down mentions of Griffin\u2019s wealth. \u201cEast Hampton\u201d became the beach. Her famous friends, if included, went unnamed. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t to be deceptive,\u201d as one person familiar with the editing process told me. \u201cIt was an attempt to make it accessible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The character of Mr. Mason was likewise denuded, appearing faceless and ageless. The reader isn\u2019t told what subject he teaches at the school or anything about who he might be as a person beyond his violence. Much of this was at the advice of lawyers, protecting Griffin and the publisher from defamation suits. Mason is described as one of Griffin\u2019s \u201cfavorite teachers,\u201d and yet there are few interactions between them before the assaults begin. \u201cI remember being upset by a lot of the cuts,\u201d Griffin told me that day in the hotel. \u201cLike, Wait, but this ruins the buildup to the story. It ruins the understanding of what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
When she speaks about the teacher now, her body visibly trembles. She never names him, avoiding even the book\u2019s pseudonym. At several points in our meeting when discussion turned to the abuse, she began repeatedly yawning. The first time it happened, she apologized. She wasn\u2019t tired, she explained; it was a nervous-system response.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis person didn\u2019t grab my arm in the hallway one day and drag me into the bathroom,\u201d Griffin said. She was with him all the time. She told me he would pull her out of class by sending her other teachers handwritten notes, pretending she was needed in his room. When she arrived, he\u2019d proclaim to the class, \u201cAmy\u2019s here!\u201d and throw his long arms open, she said, \u201cas wide as wings.\u201d All of this, she said, was cut from late drafts of The Tell.<\/p>\n
In her memoir, Griffin\u2019s sexual abuse by Mr. Mason does not appear until well into the story, where it comes as a dramatic reveal. Lansky wanted it to read like a mystery. There was also a sense that readers were tired of trauma stories. One person close to the process told me, \u201cThe thinking was if you opened with \u2018This is a book about sexual abuse,\u2019 nobody was going to want to read it.\u201d At Frick\u2019s suggestion, Lansky set about organizing the narrative into three parts. The first would detail Griffin\u2019s life as she recalled it before recovering her memories, culminating in the first moments of her first MDMA session \u2014 a cliffhanger. The middle section would recount her abuse and attempts to make sense of it all, and the final third would portray Griffin\u2019s efforts to heal.<\/p>\n
But it was not true that Griffin had ever fully forgotten what happened to her. She knew, in a way she struggled to define \u2014 in a way she had worked hard to suppress \u2014 that she had been sexually abused.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, I \u2014 \u201d her voice cracked as she spoke. \u201cI would get glimpses of this feeling of I did something wrong. This is so deeply shameful. This is so horrific. But then it was like, No, no, I can\u2019t \u2014 I\u2019m not going to go there.\u201d<\/p>\n
In college, Griffin seemed to try to open up to a friend, a volleyball teammate. The friend told me that on two occasions Griffin implied she\u2019d been sexually violated, but she was vague and dropped the topic quickly. Seven years ago, when Griffin needed a six-hour surgery \u2014 for a labral tear; her decades of running had taken a toll \u2014 she thought about telling someone. \u201cI was alone, and I was about to be put under,\u201d she told me. \u201cAnd I thought to myself, Should I be honest about this now, in case something happens to me?\u201d<\/p>\n
Griffin said she did not connect this awareness to Mr. Mason until the MDMA allowed her to look at these dark memories. And yet she\u2019d thought about him every day for most of her life. \u201cBeing in his car,\u201d she said, \u201cpulling out of the school driveway. I knew exactly the mannerisms of how he moved. I knew exactly how he leaned against a desk. I remember the color and decals on his car as well as I remember my own name.\u201d Every day, she said, these recollections felt like something closing in her chest. Sometimes thinking of the teacher made her feel ill.<\/p>\n
The MDMA allowed her to finally link this feeling with her awareness of abuse. As Griffin explained it now, the drug did not reveal new memories whole cloth but let her stop and face what she knew in fuller view. While on the drug, she was no longer afraid to look. Griffin told me that calling the memories \u201crecovered\u201d \u201cwas too simplistic.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the book, when the MDMA facilitator, Olivia (a pseudonym), arrives at Griffin\u2019s house for the first time, Griffin tells her, \u201cThere\u2019s something I can\u2019t face. I know something happened to me, something I\u2019m talking around. But I don\u2019t know what it is. It\u2019s like I can\u2019t remember. Or maybe I don\u2019t want to remember.\u201d<\/p>\n
In real life, Griffin says, the two women were on their way downstairs to a guest room when Griffin told Olivia what she knew. Griffin was holding a Starbucks coffee; Olivia had just been suggesting Griffin get socks and a sweatshirt before they began, that she might get cold. \u201cI have to tell you,\u201d Griffin said, \u201cI experienced a lot of sexual trauma and abuse between childhood and 21.\u201d (At 21, she was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance.) \u201cI don\u2019t know what to do with it,\u201d she said. The real person represented by Olivia, who asked that I not use her name as the work she does remains illegal, confirmed the substance of Griffin\u2019s account.<\/p>\n
In a statement, a representative for Dial Press said that they were unaware there had been any decision to withhold a revelation or that Griffin was aware of her abuse before taking MDMA. As a defendant in Altum\u2019s lawsuit, Lansky was wary of saying too much. But he provided a statement approved by his lawyer: \u201cI have wondered whether certain aspects of the book may have been misinterpreted by readers. Because it didn\u2019t focus on Amy\u2019s wealth, when people saw the scale of the book\u2019s rollout, some readers may have assumed, wrongly, that she was hiding something. And then there was the structure \u2014 which we wanted so the book would feel cinematic and propulsive \u2026 But I never could have anticipated the response. Nobody writes a literary memoir expecting it to later be subjected to a forensic analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n
One person close to the process saw it differently: \u201cI think the narrative choices were deeply questionable. And in a lot of ways, they set her up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two weeks before my trip to Las Vegas, I met Claudia \u2014 or the woman Griffin refers to as Claudia \u2014 over Zoom. She had told me over text that she hadn\u2019t read The Tell and that she didn\u2019t want to talk, but a few days later, she changed her mind.<\/p>\n
Claudia was polite and cautious, circumspect. She confirmed she knew Griffin in childhood \u2014 they\u2019d overlapped for one year in middle school. \u201cWe weren\u2019t friends,\u201d Claudia said. \u201cBut I remembered her fondly. She did something nice for me many years ago.\u201d She meant the dress, which Griffin had indeed loaned her for cotillion when Claudia was in seventh grade.<\/p>\n
When Griffin asked to meet up at a coffee shop in 2023, \u201cI thought, This woman obviously needs to get something off her chest,\u201d Claudia said. \u201cAnd if talking with me could help her healing process, why wouldn\u2019t I go?\u201d Just as Griffin writes in The Tell, she brought Claudia Taco Villa. When Griffin began to talk about the teacher and the assaults, she says, \u201cI just let her talk.\u201d Claudia told her she was sorry.<\/p>\n
Claudia clarified that she had read some passages from The Tell \u2014 her mom had texted her screenshots \u2014 and she bristled at how she\u2019d been represented. \u201cI mean, who refers to somebody as poor?\u201d she said. She also said that Griffin had not let her know she was writing a book. When the memoir came out, Claudia felt misled. (Griffin disputes this; but she said, \u201cI was so grateful for this meeting, it was such an important step for me.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Claudia told me \u2014 as she\u2019d told Griffin \u2014 she did not remember Mr. Mason. But she could clearly recall the dress Griffin lent her. \u201cIt was navy,\u201d she said. \u201cWith pink flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Griffin had been warned against telling her story; friends were sure it would upend her life. Before the book deal, in early 2023, she had lunch with Anna Wintour, then the editor of Vogue. Both women served on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Griffin had written an essay about the assaults by her teacher, called \u201cThe Flow of Water,\u201d and asked if she could send it to Wintour to see what she thought of it. \u201cBut you have such a nice life,\u201d Wintour replied. (Griffin decided to not publish the essay.) Her mom friends in the city also discouraged her from going public. \u201cLook, it\u2019s the Upper East Side,\u201d one told me. \u201cYou should only appear in the paper on your wedding day and in your obituary.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Griffin believed that publishing the book would be worth it and that she was far better positioned than most to endure whatever opprobrium might come. \u201cShe blew up her very private, very comfortable life to do this thing,\u201d the Upper East Side friend said. \u201cSure, she wanted the attention and she wanted to validate her own story. But I also think she really cares. She wanted to help survivors.\u201d<\/p>\n
The way it all played out, the friend said, was a tragedy. Two women in a tug-of-war to own a horrific trauma, while the two accused men recede from the story. Even in this investigation, their identities are protected. (While Griffin\u2019s alleged abuser was shielded by the statute of limitations, Altum never tried to bring charges against hers.) In the court documents for both women\u2019s lawsuits, the teachers are redacted completely. Even the subject Mr. Mason taught is blacked out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just think it\u2019s possible,\u201d Griffin\u2019s friend said, \u201cthat it happened to more than one girl.\u201d In an email sent after we met, Altum\u2019s lawyer told me he and his client believe it is \u201cimplausible\u201d the two girls could have been sexually assaulted by two different teachers on the same night. But abusers borrow tactics from one another all the time. It is also very easy to understand, Griffin\u2019s friend said, how some of the details could have gotten mixed up. \u201cSomething similar happened at my middle school,\u201d the friend went on. \u201cSo many of us have had these experiences. In a weird way, it\u2019s all of our story. There is no one unscathed, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
In early September, I spoke with Griffin\u2019s middle-school volleyball coach, Barb Bixler, who appears in The Tell as Bess Taylor. \u201cI believe Amy wholeheartedly,\u201d she told me. Looking back at Griffin\u2019s time at the middle school, she said, \u201cI\u2019m surprised at my own inability to have seen it.\u201d Bixler told me she was abused as a child herself; she felt she should have understood what she now believes was right in front of her. Mr. Mason, she said, \u201cwas always around. He was always in the gym, always there in that time period for volleyball practice.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I asked about Altum\u2019s claims, Bixler said she hadn\u2019t known Altum well \u2014 she\u2019d taught her in PE \u2014 but she didn\u2019t doubt her story. \u201cHonestly, I think there could have been two perpetrators,\u201d she said. \u201cI think Amy had one, and I think Joleene had one.\u201d Bixler believed she knew who Altum\u2019s alleged abuser may have been. He and Mr. Mason, she said, were good friends. She told me she had seen him be inappropriate with students \u2014 being touchy, making lewd comments \u2014 and that at one point she removed students from his supervision.<\/p>\n
In mid-September, one of Griffin\u2019s lawyers sent over a photo: It was Griffin as a young teenager in the floral dress \u2014 poofy sleeves, pink and yellow and green. She has braces and wears pink lip gloss. The lawyer said it was the night of the dance in question. And it seems to be: Griffin\u2019s date is wearing a version of the old \u201chillbilly\u201d Sadie Hawkins costume: denim-and-cowhide pants, a denim shirt, a red bandanna, and a cattleman\u2019s hat.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/9640f19fa2a1e3afad1215f1860f0e326a-griffin-secondary.w710.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Griffin the night both women say they were sexually assaulted.<\/p>\n
Some hours later, the lawyer sent a second photo. It was one of Griffin\u2019s friends from Amarillo, given the pseudonym Allie in the book, wearing the same dress a year later when Griffin had gone off to high school.<\/p>\n
I spoke with Allie in August. She lives in Austin now. \u201cI looked up to Amy,\u201d she said. They\u2019d been close, playing volleyball and serving together on a student committee.<\/p>\n
In The Tell, Allie says she can vividly recall Mr. Mason paying Griffin special attention. He was \u201calways staring,\u201d she tells Griffin. \u201cI have such a clear memory of him standing really close to you, talking, in the hallway.\u201d The year after Griffin graduated, Allie tells her, Mason chaperoned an overnight student trip. Allie told me it was to Palo Duro Canyon, not far outside Amarillo. Mr. Mason, she said, had driven one of her friends to the site, into the high plains, with the top down, staring between her legs as they went. That night, when everyone was asleep, the girls in a room together, Allie woke up \u2014 a light was on. And there was Mr. Mason, staring at her.<\/p>\n
Allie had one more story, not included in The Tell. She said she did not tell Griffin about it while the book was being written.<\/p>\n
It was the week before Allie started eighth grade, and she had come to campus for a club meeting. She was alone with Mr. Mason in his classroom, and she walked up to his desk to ask a question. As he answered, she said, he leaned back in his chair, putting his hands behind his head and kicking up his feet. \u201cHe always had boots on,\u201d she told me. Mason stared at her a moment. \u201cHe said, \u2018God, I miss Amy.\u2019 He looked me dead in my eyes and he said, \u2018Do you want to be my new Amy?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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