Overview
- Griffin filed a defamation suit in federal court in Nevada, saying on Monday that a former middle-school classmate’s public statements and a separate California lawsuit falsely accused her of stealing the woman’s sexual-abuse story for Griffin’s 2025 memoir The Tell.
- Griffin’s complaint points to contemporaneous records — a written account from 2020 and a detailed interview with Amarillo police in 2021 — to argue she documented her abuse before the accuser says she was contacted in 2022.
- The accuser, who sued in California under the name Jane Doe in March, told The New York Times that parts of The Tell resembled her own experiences and said seeing them in the book re-traumatized her; she has rejected Griffin’s new suit and says the facts will be proved in court.
- The New York Times has publicly defended its reporting and said Griffin’s lawsuit misrepresents the paper’s story and fact-checking, while Griffin’s filing criticizes the Times’ coverage without naming the paper as a defendant.
- Legal rulings on Griffin’s Nevada defamation claim and her efforts to dismiss the California case will determine which timelines and documents the courts accept, and the outcome could affect how publishers and journalists evaluate memoir claims that rely on recovered memory and contemporaneous evidence.