“The Tell” never told the whole story

Last week, news broke that Amy Griffin, author of the 2025 New York Times bestselling memoir “The Tell,” had filed a lawsuit against the anonymous former classmate who, last March, sued Griffin, alleging that several of the anecdotes in the book — which details a horrific experience of childhood rape and sexual abuse — were not Griffin’s, but her own. Griffin’s countersuit claims that the classmate’s lawsuit characterizes her as “a fraud and a thief.” This isn’t the kind of delicious, schadenfreude-dipped publishing-world drama about a bad art friend that other writers love to deconstruct in group texts. It’s a dispiriting legal battle in which two women who likely suffered profound sexual trauma are publicly battling, one with a focus on preserving both her reputation and her business interests, and the other with almost nothing on her side, including, thanks to Griffin’s countersuit, anonymity.

“The Tell” is about a woman who is by every possible measure successful, trying to understand what unseen force is holding her back from an otherwise beautiful life — impacting her marriage, alienating her children and causing panic attacks. On the encouragement of her equally successful, equally blessed husband, Griffin agrees to try therapeutic MDMA. A former star student and long-distance runner from a prominent family in Amarillo, Texas, Griffin goes into her first session with a competitor’s single-minded determination to, as she writes, “get to the finish line.”

It takes almost no time for the drug to unearth memories of habitual sexual abuse by a teacher at her middle school that began when Griffin was 12 and continued until she was 16. Her confidence in the memories she recovers (“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”) sets her on a relentless trajectory of seeking legal and emotional redress.

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I listened to “The Tell” on audiobook knowing very little about it. I didn’t know that Griffin is married to a billionaire former hedge-fund founder, or that she’s on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees, or that her own venture-capital firm, G9, has made her a billionaire in her own right. I didn’t see the seals of approval from America’s trio of book-club heavies — Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager — on its cover. I didn’t read the glowing blurbs for a first-time author from Gwyneth Paltrow, Gloria Steinem, Chanel Miller and Mariska Hargitay. I didn’t know that the book wasn’t written so much as it was built by a prominent ghostwriter, a cadre of well-placed friends and colleagues, and a publishing industry that’s made billions of dollars from trauma memoirs by women.

Those things weren’t important to know in order to be moved by Griffin’s tale of how a lifelong quest for perfection set her mind and body against one another with devastating results. But both Griffin’s stature and her story had readers asking questions even before the book was published in March 2025. The first sign of trouble came in a New York Times investigation titled “The billionaire, the psychedelics, and the best-selling memoir.” The piece drilled down on key information missing from the book; reporters Katherine Rosman and Elisabeth Egan visited Amarillo, where doubts about the book’s veracity were stoked by the absence of other survivors coming forward to either corroborate Griffin’s accounts or share their own. The piece questioned why the memories Griffin recovered in the course of using illegal psychedelic drugs were so readily accepted by institutions, like law enforcement and book publishing, that would normally proceed more cautiously.

Most strikingly, the piece noted that a former classmate of Griffin’s, who features prominently in the book under a pseudonym, was “deeply unnerved” by descriptions of rape that were “eerily similar to the abuse she herself endured.” The classmate had been contacted several years earlier by someone claiming to be a talent agent, and she recognized in “The Tell” details she had shared with the alleged agent. In March 2026, the classmate filed a civil lawsuit naming Griffin, ghostwriter Sam Lansky and the book’s publisher, alleging invasion of privacy, negligence and infliction of emotional distress.

“The Tell” is not a fabrication; those who have read it agree that something very traumatic happened to Griffin, and that her brain locked it away as a protective measure. But researchers and practitioners of psychedelic medicine suspect that Griffin’s inexperience with psychedelics and use of an unlicensed facilitator may have led to a consequential lack of integration, a process in which facilitator and patient sort through the experience, interrogating symbolism and considering what information brought forth by the medicine is useful. 

“Psychedelics are meaning-making medicines,” says Dr. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist whose 2020 book “Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection from Soul to Psychedelics” explored, among other mental-health interventions, the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapy. “They make things seem more meaningful than perhaps they are.” Integration, she emphasizes, is crucial to psychedelic therapy. “You really need somebody on the other side of the trip to hold your hand and make sense of what you figured out, [and] to say, ‘OK, you had this experience. What are you going to do with this information?’”

The New York Times reported that Griffin and her husband, John, have donated an estimated $1 million to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), arguably the biggest name in psychedelics research; they are clearly bullish on the future of MDMA, psilocybin, and other mind-expanding drugs. This makes it difficult to understand why the couple, who would presumably have access to therapists trained in psychedelic medicine, instead worked with a facilitator named Olivia who, when Griffin asks after her credentials, laughs and says, “A lot of experience.”

Olivia looks, Griffin writes, “like the divine feminine incarnate — elegant, with long, wild auburn hair, porcelain skin, and a cotton sundress . . . She’d been in the psychedelic movement for decades, and she was gentle and knowledgeable as she explained her work.” But how would Griffin (who describes her only drug use as a single hit of weed that, she’s careful to point out, “I didn’t inhale”) know what knowledgeable looked like in this unfamiliar context? Similarly, Olivia’s description of a facilitated MDMA trip as “a day with yourself, with the you that you’ve forgotten” would almost definitely raise red flags for trained practitioners. But for Griffin, this New Age Page-A-Day calendar patter sounds “like poetry.”

Olivia’s role in Griffin’s therapy is one of two big pieces missing from “The Tell.” In Griffin’s own account, she ended her first MDMA session by pulling off her eyeshade and asking Olivia to go get John, to whom she says, “I was abused by a teacher as a child.” There’s no mention of taking a beat to process with Olivia; John simply leads Griffin to their bedroom and tucks her in.

In what appears to be the only comprehensive query of Olivia’s possible ethical lapses, Jules Evans, founder of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project (CPEP), writes that “therapists’ professional codes of ethics warn [them] not to socialize with clients, not to give them expensive gifts, not to become . . . ‘trusted friends.’” The Griffins’ relationship with Olivia blew right past all those guidelines, and not just because she wasn’t a therapist. Extremely wealthy people regularly bend rules and hand-wave ethical standards to get what they want as soon as they want it, and those who work with and for them aren’t in the position to advise pumping the brakes. Everything Griffin writes suggests that she and her husband chose Olivia based on her glamour and not her track record — was she really going to tell Griffin that a drug she’d never used before, which seemed to explain everything she needed to know, shouldn’t be treated as a faultless oracle?

A story like Griffin’s is a source of concern for Dr. Samuli Kangaslampi, a researcher whose work at Finland’s Tampere University focuses on psychedelics and memory. Speaking at 2025’s 3rd Finnish Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelics, Dr. Kangaslampi laid out the 6 open questions that should drive future studies of psychedelics and memory experiences, particularly the recall of traumatic events. Dr. Kangaslampi mentions “The Tell” only in passing, but his entreaty (“Please, let’s not start doing psychedelic-assisted recovered-memory therapy”), along with his assertion that, “There is no benevolent plant spirit or inherent intelligence in psychedelics that guarantees that what we’ve experienced is real. It’s not like that,” suggests that the drama around the book hasn’t been great news for researchers.

The high-profile (and later discredited) role of recovered memory during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s left the phenomenon with a reputation as the sensationalist gambit of crackpot doctors. But it’s not quite that simple, Holland says. “I think most psychiatrists very much err on the side of believing victims. The last thing you want to do, especially with sexual abuse against kids, is doubt a victim report. What’s more important than even what actually happens [in] an assault is whether they are believed.”

This is both crucial and ironic in Griffin’s case, given that her legal strategy rests on the expectation that some victims are credible and some aren’t. After Rosman and Egan noted the similarities between the two women’s experiences, Griffin’s lawyer told the reporters that they had been “duped by a fabulist.” Griffin and her lawyer also refused to answer any of the questions sent to them for fact-checking purposes, replying instead that “[T]he mere sending of this document has caused additional trauma and extreme physical and emotional harm to a survivor of sexual assault, which is inexcusable.”

Griffin’s countersuit calls her former classmate’s allegations of theft false and asserts that “financial damages [will] be determined at trial.” The former Jane Doe’s name has now leaked via court documents, furthering an already pronounced imbalance of power. Griffin has the money, the access, the celebrity connections, and the book industry backing necessary to bury her classmate’s charges.

But she also has something to lose, and this is the second big piece missing from “The Tell.” Though Griffin mentions her husband’s interest in funding psychedelics research early in the book, she doesn’t mention their association with Resilient Pharmaceuticals, the for-profit company that was spun off as the corporate arm of MAPS with the intention of selling legal MDMA once the drug is FDA-approved. (Jules Evans has characterized the Griffins as “shareholders” in Resilient, an assertion repeated in more granular coverage of the legal backstory, but one I’ve been unable to verify.) Listening to the book, it’s hard to ignore the passages that sound like an infomercial for therapeutic MDMA; knowing that the Griffins are invested in its legalization and sale explains why.

Griffin’s financial interests elsewhere have also not been transparent. The outsized promotional push for “The Tell” was facilitated by high-profile women like Paltrow and Spanx founder Sara Blakely, who joined Griffin at book events and chatted with her on podcasts but didn’t disclose the author’s investment in their businesses. The A-listers name-checked in Griffin’s book proposal as potential hype women — more than 90, according to Rosman and Egan, from Laura Dern and Naomi Watts to Anna Wintour and Katie Couric  — were catnip to publishers. They’ve been scarce since the book’s legal troubles began, but having dozens of marquee names who can be called on to circle the wagons is one more example of the power Griffin holds relative to her former classmate.

Psychedelics, says Kangaslampi, “enhance suggestibility, sense of salience, significance, familiarity and certainty of knowing.” The professionals who have weighed in on “The Tell” don’t doubt that Griffin’s reactions to her resurfaced memories are real. But they also emphasize that a trauma response isn’t necessarily confirmation of a memory’s accuracy. “A lot of the time we can say, you know, ‘It doesn’t matter if the memory is true or not if it’s useful, if it’s therapeutic,” says Kangaslampi. But in cases of recalled trauma, he stresses, “It makes a huge difference whether that memory is true or not.”