What if it's a lie? A billionaire's best-selling story of abuse has raised questions about it.

Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager looked euphoric onstage at the Ford Foundation in Manhattan earlier this year, posing with a new book . The crowd was so large it needed an overflow room. The book was The Tell , an autobiographical text by Amy Griffin, a debut author and one of the richest women in the country . Not only did Griffin get the first co-endorsement from those three influential book club leaders, but Oprah Winfrey also chose The Tell as her 112th book club pick.

In her memoir, Griffin, 49, writes that she engaged in illegal psychedelic drug therapy. Under the influence of MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, or Molly, she recalled being raped numerous times by a high school teacher in Amarillo, Texas , beginning when she was 12.
“I knew those memories were real,” Griffin writes. “My body knew what had happened to me. How I trembled as I told my story, how my eyes filled with tears at the mere mention of Texas.”
Amy Griffin was paid nearly $1 million to write her story, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. The book became an immediate sensation and received enthusiastic support from celebrities and influencers with huge social media followings.
Many of Griffin's supporters were friends, members of an exclusive world where billionaires and celebrities share private jets for remote getaways and showcase their relationships on Instagram.
Another part also collaborated with companies, charities and political campaigns that receive financial support from Amy Griffin, who sits on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bumble , the parent company of the dating app of the same name.
"It's an incredible book," Gwyneth Paltrow commented on the Goop podcast, introducing Griffin without revealing that the author was an investor in the company founded by the actress. "I'm incredibly proud of her," Paltrow continued, describing her as "a beautiful woman, incredibly positive and brilliant."
The Tell sold more than 100,000 copies , according to Circana, an industry monitoring service. This past spring, it spent four weeks on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list and received rave reviews from numerous readers. It also prompted Griffin to embark on a publicity tour worthy of an Oscar winner.
In the aftermath of the MeToo movement, stories of sexual abuse are often greeted with compassion and support, not probing questioning . The Tell also benefited from the publishing industry's growing reliance on celebrity-related books that can boost sales. Many of these books are memoirs, which are rarely verified.
In the wake of the MeToo movement, stories of sexual abuse are often met with compassion and support, not probing questioning.
But more and more people have been expressing suspicions about The Tell, including in online reviews. Some have questioned the reliability of decades-old memories unearthed during drug-assisted therapy. Others have wondered how such abuse could have occurred in a public school without anyone older than them spotting clues.
“It’s a book that the media-industrial complex has completely absorbed,” opined the scathing columnist Maureen Callahan, referring to the memoir on her podcast “The Nerve.” “And on the other side,” she added, “is a guy who doesn’t have Amy Griffin’s money, power, or resources.”
The Tell has been a topic of conversation from the conservative Texas Panhandle that includes Amarillo to high-end coastal developments in East Hampton to the well-funded labs of the pharmaceutical industry. In recent months , The New York Times has interviewed dozens of people in Amarillo , the publishing industry, the medical and MDMA communities, and Texas officials, and reviewed the book proposal Amy Griffin used to pitch her project to publishers.
A classmate shared detailed accounts of being attacked —by a different teacher—in the same locations Griffin describes, including at the same high school dance.
Knowing what happened between Amy Griffin and her teacher in the late 1980s may be impossible. In the book, Amy herself admits that she had no way to confirm her story: “There was no smoking gun, no physical evidence, no tangible trace. There had been no witnesses.”

Still, the book has had significant repercussions for those who were in Griffin's childhood circle . It has also made many people living in Amarillo, a city of 200,000, feel somewhat observed, but also reduced to a caricature by an author who hasn't lived there for decades.
Following the avalanche of publicity, Amarillo law enforcement officials and victims' rights activists expected more students to file charges against the Griffin teacher , who worked in the school district for 30 years. During his career as an educator, no one had filed a complaint against him , according to information from state education and law enforcement officials, and according to the book's publication.
Amy Griffin's accusations are based on her experiences in therapy with an illegal psychedelic that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refused to approve for therapeutic use last year, a drug backed by a company in which Griffin and her husband, through their foundation, have invested. Whether the product actually helps patients recover accurate memories is a matter of debate.
Rick Doblin, the country's leading advocate and specialist in the therapeutic use of MDMA, said he connected Griffin with his therapists. In an interview earlier this year, Doblin said he had read several drafts of the book and called it "important."
However, he downplayed the accuracy of memories recovered with MDMA, stating that they are often "symbolic." "Whether it's real or not—that is, whether the incident actually happened—doesn't matter from a therapeutic perspective," he maintained. "People often create stories that help them make sense of their lives."
“In the therapeutic realm,” he added, “what Amy experienced, whether true or not, has value because the emotion is real .”
Rick Doblin, a PhD in public policy, said that “the terrifying memories that people erase from their minds do return under the influence of MDMA,” but “you have to maintain some skepticism, I guess, about recovered memories.” (The day before this article was published, Doblin contacted The New York Times and insisted that he believed Griffin’s memories were real.)
Griffin describes the teacher she accuses of assaulting her so accurately that some Amarillo readers were able to identify him , even though she used a pseudonym. The Times was also able to determine the individual's identity: In her book proposal sent to publishers, Amy Griffin names the rapist and includes details about a family tragedy that the teacher suffered. The name was also shared among Amarillo residents by Griffin's relatives after learning of her recovered memories.
For more than three months, Amy Griffin declined interview requests. Penguin Random House, publisher of The Tell, did not inform the professor about the book or its allegations before publication because it believed the identity of the person involved was sufficiently concealed , according to Thomas A. Clare, an attorney specializing in author counseling regarding defamation. It is unclear whether local school officials were notified. An attorney for the Amarillo Independent School District declined to comment.
The teacher did not respond to letters left for him or mailed to his home , or to email requests for comment. Some people who worked and attended the high school in question say they are troubled by the specter of undetected child abuse . But others are alarmed that a teacher with an impeccable record has been branded a rapist with no chance of defending himself . Without exception, no one reports seeing the now-retired teacher around town since the book's publication.

Earlier this month, The Times sent attorney Thomas Clare an 11-page list of questions and information likely to be included in this article for fact-checking purposes. Clare estimated that “ the mere sending of this document has caused additional trauma and extreme physical and emotional harm to a sexual assault survivor, which is inexcusable.”
Following the book launch at the Ford Foundation, where actress Mariska Hargitay moderated a panel discussion, Griffin got to work. She was interviewed by business strategist and feminist Sheryl Sandberg (in Menlo Park, California), journalist and author Hoda Kotb (in New Canaan, Connecticut), actresses Reese Witherspoon (also a theorist and activist; in Nashville) and Gwyneth Paltrow (also a communicator and entrepreneur; in Summerland, California), and TV host and author Jenna Bush Hager (in Austin, Texas).
For Oprah Winfrey's podcast, Griffin sat down with the host on camera in front of a rapt audience. On multi-faceted entrepreneur Martha Stewart's podcast, she mentioned that she considered MDMA therapy "a permission slip to go in, explore, and be compassionate with myself." On actress Drew Barrymore's show, the women held hands as Amy Griffin described her book as "without a doubt, the most honest thing I'll ever do."

The appearances have been boosted by Griffin's selection last spring as one of Time magazine's "most influential" people of the year. "By opening up about her intimacy, she became a role model for women around the world," Witherspoon wrote in an essay for the magazine.
In The Tell, Griffin portrays the happy days of her childhood in Amarillo in the 1980s, with girls riding banana-seat bikes to candy stores. But in high school, she writes , her idyllic life took a terrifying turn, one she says she would recall more than three decades later with the help of MDMA, which she refers to as "the medicine."
“The first thing I remember was my head hitting the wall,” Griffin writes. Then, “I heard a metallic clang as his belt buckle fell to the floor.”
She talks about the places where she says she was assaulted : the high school bathroom, the locker room, a classroom, and under the bleachers. "He raped me there too," she writes. The abuse is described as violent and blatant.
She says the teacher tied her hands behind her back with a scarf and describes "his penis in my mouth" and "his pubic hair in my face." She says he hit her, dragged her across the bathroom floor, and washed her mouth out with soap. On the night of her eighth-grade dance, Griffin says he assaulted her in her classroom. "If you tell anyone," she claims the man told her at one point, "I'll knock your teeth out."
The book states that the final assault occurred when Amy was 16. She was on her way to a tennis match and bumped into the teacher. Moments later, she found herself following him "in a daze" to the tennis center's equipment room.
In referring to this incident, Griffin addresses the reader's potential skepticism, as he frequently does in the book: "You'd guess that looking back on this, I should have thought, 'But wasn't I sixteen already?' That I should have asked myself, 'Why didn't I stop him?' That I should have thought, 'How could he have done that in such a public place? Why didn't I say no?' That I should have thought, 'Where were my boundaries?'"
“But I didn't think anything of it,” she writes. “In the golden arms of medicine, the compassion I felt for young Amy was absolute.”
Griffin grew up as a descendant of one of Amarillo's most influential families, the Mitchells. When she was young, they owned about 50 businesses in the Toot'n Totum chain of convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, and other establishments. Now they have 100, according to a lengthy article published months ago in the Amarillo lifestyle magazine Brick & Elm.
After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1998, Amy worked in marketing for Sports Illustrated , a position she left several months before marrying John A. Griffin, whose former hedge fund Blue Ridge Capital managed nearly $9 billion at its peak. The couple has four children and lives in a luxury townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, which they purchased in 2019 for $77 million . They also own homes in various locations, including the Bahamas and New Zealand.
Through G9 Ventures, a company she founded in 2017, Griffin invests in women-founded companies. According to an email sent to The Times by her public relations agent, Amy Griffin is the "startup investor" behind companies like Goop.
In The Tell, Griffin writes that her adult life might have seemed lovely to other people, but that she wasn't always happy.
She recalls that she and her 10-year-old daughter had a fight that included slamming doors, during which the girl questioned her mother's need to appear perfect. "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to have you as a mother?" she asked, according to The Tell.
Before taking the MDMA pill, Griffin had told the therapy coordinator, “There’s something I can’t deal with. I know something happened to me, something like this I’m talking about. But I don’t know what it is .”
Five minutes into the session, she recounts in the book, Amy sat up and asked, "Why is he here?" The coordinator asked, "Who?"

“Mr. Mason. From my high school,” Amy replied. (Mr. Mason is the pseudonym the author uses for the teacher in the book.) In The Tell , Griffin describes two more experiences with MDMA and subsequent psychotherapy sessions with a professional who assured her that her violent memories were likely real.
He notes that this professional told him, “I have no reason to suspect that these are false or implanted memories.”
Amy Griffin assembled a team of legal and private investigation specialists to help her file a lawsuit against the professor.
A lawyer warned her of possible consequences. "You're richer than your former professor," Griffin said the lawyer told her. "If you press charges against him, there's a chance he'll sue you for defamation."
Still, another of the lawyers approached the Amarillo district attorney's office, prompting a phone call from a police detective Amy refers to in the book as Sergeant Hank Jones.
Griffin says her lawyer advised her not to tell the police that her rape memories had been recovered through the use of illegal psychedelics. (When asked for comment, her lawyer did not respond.)
Over the course of a two-hour conversation, Griffin writes, he detailed his memories of abuse to Sergeant Jones. "This is one of the most compelling calls I've ever had in all my years of experience," the detective remarked, citing the book.
But before he could begin investigating, Amy Griffin writes, the sergeant called her with disappointing news. The high school incidents she reported had expired . (In 2007, the state of Texas eliminated the statute of limitations for most child sex crimes, but Griffin's case couldn't be upheld.) "Justice wasn't going to be served," Griffin writes.
She considered filing a civil suit, but ultimately decided against it. She decided to write a book. She hired Sam Lansky, a ghostwriter who contributed to Britney Spears's autobiography, The Woman I Am.
“As high-profile friends in my network have reminded me,” Griffin writes in her book proposal, “I am fortunate to have a very rewarding and full life, yet have clung to my privacy and anonymity. Why would I risk that by attracting the attention that publishing this book would generate? And yet, I know I must do it. I can’t stop writing this book .”
Besides Griffin and Mr. Mason, "Claudia" – the pseudonym of a high school classmate – is one of the most important characters in The Tell.
Throughout the book, Griffin expresses that he harbored suspicions that Claudia had also been abused as a child by Mr. Mason , especially because he remembered seeing them together in a school hallway with the teacher's hand on Claudia's shoulder.
In The Tell, Amy Griffin recalls lending Claudia a dress for a Cotillion, an independent school dance. This becomes a central anecdote in the book. “The joy I felt at being able to offer Claudia that dress was immense,” she writes.
She also writes that “in my memory, the dress, Claudia, and Mr. Mason were linked in a mysterious way that I could not explain.”
After her MDMA experience, Amy Griffin says she felt an urge to reconnect with Claudia. According to the book, they met at a cafe. "Mr. Mason abused me since seventh grade," Amy says she told Claudia. She then asked if Mason had also abused her. Claudia said no. Griffin's representatives declined to reveal Claudia's identity.

Based on a student roster from a school yearbook, The Times interviewed many of Griffin's classmates, including one who said she was sexually abused during high school by a different teacher than the one Amy claims. That man left the Amarillo school district decades ago.
The classmate, who grew up in a group home for children in Amarillo, has vivid memories that fit with the central anecdotes of The Tell.
When contacted by reporters, the woman responded that she remembered Griffin, but "didn't know the book." After receiving a copy of the memoir in the mail and reading it, she said she was deeply disturbed. Some of the descriptions in The Tell of Griffin's assaults are disturbingly similar to the abuse she herself suffered , she said. She has since retained a lawyer.
The classmate agreed to speak to The Times on condition of anonymity, as she has never wanted to make her private life public.
She said the abuse had tormented her for decades and that she had confided in several close friends , including her daughter. As an adult, the daughter told The Times that her mother described the assaults to her 12 years earlier.
Today, Griffin's life and that of her classmate are markedly different . In late June, while Amy Griffin was traveling to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez's wedding in Venice, her classmate was working as a home health aide to an Alzheimer's patient for $21 an hour.
In high school, Griffin and her classmate weren't friends, but their lives intersected at school and in church . The classmate, who cited a deeply abusive and transient childhood, recalled that while she struggled to be accepted by the more popular girls, Griffin, their leader, treated her with distant benevolence.
The classmate told The Times that she had borrowed a dress from Griffin for the Cotillion, but ultimately couldn't attend. She wore it instead to the eighth-grade dance.
At that dance, Amy Griffin writes in the book that she herself was raped while wearing a borrowed dress.
“I was in Mr. Mason’s classroom,” Griffin writes. “It was early evening, and it was still light outside. He had the frilly dress pulled up over my head, and I was bent over a desk while he raped me from behind. I could feel the weight of the dress on my head, blocking out the light.”
In various interviews, the classmate recounted her own experience at that dance in detail . She said she had left the dance floor with her abuser—a teacher who was not Mason—and they went to a supply closet under the pretext of looking for decorations. There, the teacher assaulted her and, in the process, soiled the dress Amy Griffin had lent her.
The classmate recalled the embarrassment she felt when she and the professor met with the crowd, her hair disheveled and what she described as the smell of sex clinging to her. At the time, she was sure that different students knew why she and the professor had left and returned together, but she said they never explicitly mentioned it.
The companion also said she remembered returning the dress to a church youth meeting at Amy's home, where she apologized profusely for the stain. (Griffin's attorney reported that her family had never hosted a church group at their home.)
Thomas Clare, Griffin's attorney, claimed that the companion interviewed by The Times was not the character Amy refers to as Claudia in the book. He added that The Times had been "duped by a fabulist" and threatened to file a lawsuit, alleging discrepancies between what Griffin wrote and what the companion told The Times.
Among those discrepancies, the classmate told The Times that she had met Griffin in person once in recent years, and Griffin's lawyer said Amy denied it.
Mr. Clare also questioned the woman's veracity, claiming there were similarities between her story and the account described by Amy Griffin in the book. "Anyone who has read the book could (falsely) claim to have memories of abuse that match what Griffin wrote," he said.
Simply telling a story of abuse, Mr. Clare continued, "does not constitute proof or corroboration."
In the key section of "The Tell," Griffin claims to have received, shortly after his visit to Claudia, an unsigned postcard that reads, "I didn't have the strength to tell you the truth." Amy then texts Claudia, who denies having sent the postcard. The reader is left wondering.
Mr. Clare agreed to show The Times the postcard described in the book. The black-and-white photo on the front, taken in 1964 by Garry Winogrand, shows a pair of children playing on a fence in the Bronx, an image inconsistent with the message on the back.
One detail of the message written on the postcard in traditional cursive script does not match what Griffin reports in his memoirs.
In The Tell , the author claims that the postcard writer includes a quote attributed to “Amy, around seventh grade,” the time Griffin says the abuse began.
However, in the postcard shared with The Times by Griffin's lawyer, the quote is attributed to "Amy, around sophomore year." The Times also found notable omissions in the book.
Amy Griffin writes that her husband was "funding research" on psychedelic-assisted therapy, without defining the scope of his involvement. Mr. Griffin donated $1 million to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, known as MAPS. Additionally, the couple, through their foundation, invested in Lykos Therapeutics (now known as Resilient Pharmaceuticals), a for-profit pharmaceutical company focused on MDMA, according to Rick Doblin, president of MAPS, who owns at least a 15 percent stake in Resilient. Resilient, partially controlled by Antonio Gracias, a close friend of Elon Musk who has worked for the Department of Government Efficiency, is prepared to sell MDMA if the FDA approves it for therapeutic use.
Furthermore, in her book proposal, Griffin writes that MDMA helped her remember another man who she says sexually abused her as a child. She names the man, a wealthy family friend, but doesn't include him, nor does she mention the assault allegation in her memoir. Contacted by The Times, the man denied Griffin's accusation.
While Griffin writes of her husband that “John was successful and respected in his career,” the extent of the family’s wealth is absent from the book. The influence of Amy Griffin’s own family, the Mitchells, is also downplayed.
Like most memoirs, these were reviewed by legal scholars but not verified by their publisher.
“This is Amy's story. We trust that she and all our authors will recount their memories truthfully.”
“Publishers aren't researchers,” said Whitney Frick, Griffin's editor at Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. “This is Amy's story. We trust her and all our authors to recount their memories truthfully.”
In March 2023, when Griffin circulated his 38-page book proposal, he titled it Believe Me. Like many proposals, Griffin's was accompanied by a list of people who could help promote the book after its publication.
Among the 90-plus names were celebrities (Amy Schumer, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts), prominent media figures (Anna Wintour, Savannah Guthrie, Katie Couric), and women whose companies Amy Griffin has invested in (Becky Kennedy, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Sara Blakley).
Publishers were attracted, and Griffin sold her memoirs to Dial Press. (Her lawyer claims she "gave away all the proceeds from the book.")
Someone not on the list was Gayle King, host of "CBS Mornings" and best friend of Oprah Winfrey. But someone Amy Griffin knew got Ms. King a copy of The Tell. Winfrey stated on television that Gayle King had told her about the book, and she then read it.
In October 2024, nearly five months before The Tell was published, the Oprah Daily and Oprah's Book Club Instagram accounts promoted the memoir to over 4.3 million followers combined.
This unleashed a tidal wave of adulation. Dozens of Griffin's friends with large social media followings praised the book that same day, including Ms. Guthrie, Jessica Seinfeld, and Charles Porch, Instagram's vice president of global partnerships.
On March 11, the day of publication, Amy Griffin sent an email to her network, encouraging friends to show their support for The Tell. She distributed a five-page presentation, promotional texts, and videos of Oprah Winfrey with a reader who was brought to tears.
Suddenly, social media was flooded with posts with superlative expressions referring to The Tell. In person, the conversations were more nuanced.
On the outskirts of Amarillo, more than a dozen people gathered a few months ago at Burrowing Owl Books to discuss the memoir. The group chatted for more than two hours. "I'm reading and thinking, 'Get it!'" one man exclaimed. "Pin it on the wall, where it belongs."
They admitted the pressure Amy Griffin likely felt having grown up in a prominent family and how keeping up appearances could make it difficult to report abuse.
Two women said they had been students of the professor ; one considered him her favorite, the other did not. A third woman said her son found it "repulsive." Towards the end of the evening, the conversation became more skeptical.
One woman, who said she believed Griffin, still had questions. "If he mistreated her like that," she said, "didn't she have bruises? Didn't she have hair missing?" Then the group began to face the fact that no one else had publicly accused Griffin's professor of sexual assault.
“The things she says he did to her,” said one woman. "You can't imagine him as an occasional aggressor."
“You are not going to choose the richest person in Amarillo as your first victim,” noted another.
The crowd was in trouble. “The only one who says it is her,” one woman pointed out , “and it was under the influence of something.” But he immediately added: "I believe him. I don't doubt his story."
Then someone asked the most challenging question of the night: "Do we believe all women or not?" In Amarillo, many people said they believed Griffin's story because they admire his family and don't see what he could gain by writing The Tell.
An advocate for assault survivors in Texas emphasized that reporting sexual crimes can be especially difficult in a patriarchal culture.
Part of Amy Griffin's home community anticipated a different reaction to The Tell. At Family Support Services, an organization that helps survivors of domestic and sexual violence, a soft interview room was set up so adult survivors of any type of sexual violence in Amarillo could discuss their stories with law enforcement officials. The space was provided with comfortable seating and state-of-the-art recording equipment, some of which was donated by Griffin.
About six months after the book's release, the room still had not been used for its intended purpose, according to Michelle Shields, the organization's director of advocacy services.
Shields said she knows that it is difficult for some women to report abuse, but that her organization hoped survivors inspired by Amy Griffin's book would come forward, as well as other victims of the professor.
“To be honest, I'm really surprised,” Ms. Shields said. Gordon Eatley was also surprised.
Sergeant Eatley is a detective with the Amarillo Police Department's Special Victims Unit specializing in child sex crimes. In The Tell he appears as “Sergeant Hank Jones”, the detective to whom Amy Griffin reports her experiences of abuse. The author writes that he listened to her “carefully and responded kindly.”
In an interview with The Times, Sergeant Eatley confirmed Griffin's recollection of their conversations. He said he was eager to begin investigating the allegations before realizing that the statute of limitations precluded prosecution.
"The story she told me, and the way she told it, seemed very credible to me ," he confirmed. "I thought, 'Great, it's going to be an interesting case to work on. It's going to require me to put all my effort into it.'"
Until the book was published, Eatley did not know that she had used MDMA . "I was never told it was a recovered memory," said the sergeant. "They just informed me that she was finally willing to talk."
Even if I had known, he clarified, and if there had been no statute of limitations, I would have tried to build a case. In any case, the consumption of illegal drugs would have represented a significant impediment.
"How do you determine which memories are hallucinations and which are real?" Sergeant Eatley asked. "The DA would have said 'What is this, man?' And the defense attorney would have swallowed it all."
Several years later, when he learned about the book, Sergeant Eatley anticipated a scandal of reactions from survivors who would denounce the abuse committed by this teacher. " I thought: 'Great, I'm going to have a second chance,' " he acknowledged. There was not going to be a second chance.
Typically, Eatley noted, people guilty of child sex crimes abuse numerous victims. "They don't stop." "I have already worked on old cases," he said. “You find other people.”
The fact that Griffin's memoirs have received enormous publicity and have yet to generate new accusations against Mr. Mason is particularly disconcerting to the sergeant. "There's nothing," says the detective. "Zero."
Translation: Román García Azcárate / © The New York Times
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