I want to believe Amy Griffin, but I don’t.

The scandal, the lawsuit, and the betrayal

The unfolding story of The Tell, best-selling memoir and Oprah book club pick, has just ratcheted up a notch from sad to sordid. Sad was The New York Times publishing in September 2025 that Amy Griffin, the memoir’s author, had possibly made up parts of the story—namely the parts about the abuse inflicted on her when she was in middle school by a teacher in her Amarillo, Texas, hometown. The tone of that article was speculative—like how could this have happened without any adults noticing or knowing? And how come, after the book was published, no other women came forward with complaints or allegations against this teacher? Horribly, in cases like these, there’s rarely one victim.

One line in that September article helps us piece together the story that’s unfolded in the months since for one of Griffin’s former classmates. It reads:

One classmate shared detailed accounts of being attacked—by a different teacher—in the very locations that Ms. Griffin wrote about, including at the same middle-school dance.

Here’s where things take a turn to sordid. The former classmate, we’ve now learned, only found out about The Tell after the Times reporters came knocking on her door investigating for that September expose. Once she read the book, according to a story in The Daily Beast, she recognized herself and her story in the book’s pages.

This classmate also alleges that that a man posing as a talent agent or producer got in touch with her (before The Tell was published) under the pretense of turning her life into a movie. The lawsuit she filed under the name Jane Doe this week in Los Angeles states:

Upon information and belief we believe “Dominique Price” was acting as an agent of Defendant GRIFFIN and/or Defendant LANSKY by falsely representing himself as a “talent agent” and “producer” in order to solicit Plaintiff’s private information and memories for unauthorized use in ‘The Tell.’ According to the suit, the conversations under those false pretenses went on for several weeks.

This is next-level sick behavior if it turns out to be true. Defendant Lansky is Sam Lansky, Amy Griffin’s high-profile ghostwriter who was one of Britney Spears’s ghostwriters. It seems to me that whatever happened with “Dominique Price” must implicate Lansky somehow—because as the ghostwriter he had to have known something wasn’t coming together right. In other words, he was either complicit or negligent.

Believe Women

This story is about to explode, and it’s heartbreaking for many reasons. For as long as I’ve worked with memoirists, they’ve worried about getting sued. And for as long as I’ve been publishing abuse memoirs, survivors have worried that they won’t be believed. That’s why when the story first came out, I gave Amy Griffin the benefit of the doubt. But the details emerging in this story make too much sense. This isn’t just a smoking gun, and this isn’t about someone with a vendetta against the author.

I have been a staunch advocate, editor, and publisher of abuse memoirs for over 20 years. These stories matter because they’re about reclaiming the narrative. Reclaiming means taking back something that was stolen from you. You were the victim, and the very brave act of publishing your story puts the shame where it rightfully belongs—back in the lap of the perpetrator. Survivors who’ve written and published memoirs of their experiences have so much to overcome in doing so. The notion that one woman would steal another woman’s story of abuse for her own gain, glory, and fame is reprehensible. Survivors stories are inspiring because the women who endure these horrors are heroes for coming through their experiences to tell their tales, to stand proud in the face of judgment and misogyny and allegations that they somehow deserved what they got. Think of Gisèle Pelicot, whose new book, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, is being rightfully celebrated for what she endured and how she’s comported herself.

I am wired to “believe women,” but I also will not believe women unconditionally—not when facts suggest deception, not when money and power are being used to advance a narrative, and not when a more vulnerable person has been betrayed in the process.

The Worst Memoir Scandal to Date?

With this week’s lawsuit, The Tell has become the biggest scandal in memoir since James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. For those who don’t remember, Frey was also an Oprah book club pick, and also turned out to have fabricated parts of his story. Frey was publicly shamed, and his publisher, Doubleday, was sued by readers in a class-action lawsuit.

If what Amy Griffin’s classmate is alleging here turns out to be true, however, this scandal is much worse. James Frey lied and people were pissed. Doubleday refunded readers their money. Oprah had Frey back on the show to interrogate him and shame him in the aftermath of the revelations. I can’t imagine Oprah bringing Griffin back on to defend herself against these allegations.

Another giant memoir scandal was Three Cups of Tea, a memoir written by Greg Mortenson, who was accused of misrepresenting himself and his story of getting lost descending K2 and then being nursed back to health by villagers in a remote Pakistani village. He was so moved by their kindness that he promised to build them a school. Problem is, his story wasn’t true, and half the schools his charity claimed to have built were found empty, built by someone else, or critically underfunded. In 2012, Mortenson agreed to repay $1 million to his charity and his reputation was destroyed.

Running with Scissors is worth bringing up here, not so much because it was a terrible scandal, but because there was a very public lawsuit in which the Turcotte family (who Augusten Burroughs writes about in his memoir) filed a lawsuit against Burroughs and his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, alleging defamation and invasion of privacy. The Turcottes settled out of court, so Burroughs got off pretty easy, but it’s important to note that Burroughs largely writes about himself and his own experiences in Running with Scissors, and no one suggests that he stole another person’s story. Part of the settlement required Burroughs to clarify in subsequent editions that the book was “based on the author’s recollections,” which is something that most memoirs now include by default on their copyright pages, or in authors’ notes.

Breaking Down the Charges

In JANE DOE VS AMY GRIFFIN , ET AL., filed this week, the et al. includes the ghostwriter, Sam Lansky, and the publisher, Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The classmate is the plaintiff, suing under the name Jane Doe. The defendants are Amy Griffin, Sam Lansky, and Penguin Random House. The charges are: 1) invasion of privacy/intrusion; 2) publication of private facts; 3) false light; 4) intentional infliction of emotional distress; 5) negligent infliction of emotional distress; 6) unfair competition; and 7) negligence. I think it’s worthwhile to break this down to consider who carries responsibility for each charge:

1) invasion of privacy/intrusion: this falls to Griffin and probably extends to Lansky, depending on how much it can be proven that he knew Griffin’s story was not her own.
—It’s hard for me to imagine, given how closely ghostwriters work with their clients, that Lansky didn’t at least suspect. When you talk to someone about their story, they either unfold the facts emotionally and honestly, or they can’t remember. This story is complicated by the fact that these were “recovered memories,” but the introduction of “Dominique Price” into this story suggests that Lansky knew what was going on.

2) publication of private facts: this falls to all parties, though the publisher can and will be able to point back to their warranty and indemnification clauses in their contract.
—A typical warranty clause reads that the book “contains no defamatory, libelous, or unlawful matter and Publisher’s exploitation of its rights shall not violate or infringe any copyright rights, rights of privacy and/or publicity, or any other statutory, common law, or other rights of any person.” When an author signs a contract agreeing to indemnify the publisher in the event of a lawsuit, it means the author will often bear the financial risk themselves, even when a publisher is named.

3) false light: falls to Amy Griffin.
—The plaintiff is going beyond invasion of privacy here to say that her experiences were reframed as Griffin’s story, and that portraying what happened to her in a false light (recovered memories, associating her real trauma with Griffin’s narrative, the MDMA therapy framework) portrays the actual abuse Jane Doe suffered in a false light.

4) intentional infliction of emotional distress and 5) negligent infliction of emotional distress: falls to Griffin and extends to Lansky, depending on his role.
—Intentional infliction is the much higher bar here, and would require the plaintiff to show “outrageous” conduct that goes beyond decency. If the Dominique Price story proves true, the intentional infliction bar will be easily met in this case.

6) unfair competition: falls to Griffin.
—This one alleges that someone gained a commercial advantage through deceptive or fraudulent business practices, meaning that they competed in the marketplace dishonestly.

7) negligence: likely aims to be more inclusive than just negligent infliction of emotional distress and to take a stab at Dial Press for publishing negligently.
—As a publisher I’ll simply state here that we trust what memoirists us bring us to be true. Publishers do not dispatch private investigators in advance of publication to make sure what writers are sharing in their books really happened, or that their stories belong to them. If that were to become a new standard for publishing memoir, memoirs would simply not get published.

A Note of Encouragement for Memoirists

Because memoirists I work with are sometimes terrified of being sued, this story will undoubtedly be a stressor for some, so I’ll close on a word about Big T vs. little t truth, and something I posted on Facebook on March 5, the very day this story broke:

In memoir, there is Big T Truth—the experience you had and the meaning it has to your story, and then there’s little t truth—the facts. If you have access to all the facts, that’s great, but most writers don’t. We cannot remember dialogue word for word. We may choose to composite our characters to protect people. There are plenty of details that are lost to history, but recreating them (for instance, the color of the room, whether you ate salmon or roast beef for dinner) won’t change the Big T Truth of the story. Hold yourself to a standard of Truth, but don’t feel so beholden to the facts that you can’t write an engaging story.

My friend, author Betsy Fasbinder, wrote in the comments: “I call these Essential Truths and Nonessential Details.” I love this simple way of stating it.

If it turns out that Amy Griffin stole Jane Doe’s story, then what she stole was the Big T Truth. She stole her former classmate and friend’s Essential Truth. Memoir is not the problem here.

Lawsuits are less prevalent than most memoirists imagine. The bar for libel and defamation is high. It takes a particular kind of person to execute what Amy Griffin is accused of having done here, to invade someone else’s privacy to such a profound degree—and then claim that story as one’s own. The fallout of this scandal will undoubtedly be that some people will cast doubt on future stories. The disservice to survivors is so profound that it’s hard even call it a disservice. It is a violation, and it is egregious.

Griffin’s lawyer said in response to the lawsuit: “We look forward to exposing these meritless claims in court, as well as the deeply flawed New York Times reporting that is at the center of it.”

Griffin’s bio on her agent’s website reads: “Amy has everything to lose by telling this story.”

This line might turn out to be the biggest tell of the whole sordid story.

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UPDATE ON MARCH 19:
I was looking to see where is Amy Griffin(?) and why so much silence around all of this, and noticed that someone updated her bio on her agent’s site so I thought I’d record that here. Someone obviously thought these lines weren’t helpful to whatever case is unfolding:

Original:

Updated: