In Defense of The Tell
on the gross negligence of that New York Times article
In case you missed it, The New York Times published a scathing critique of Amy Griffin’s memoir published in March, The Tell. You can read the piece here. Warning, it covers accounts of childhood sexual abuse. I find the article to be deeply problematic on a number of levels. Not just irresponsible journalism but bordering on harassment and abuse.
Griffin’s book is about how she underwent MDMA therapy to figure out what she was running from. Despite being incredibly successful and having what appeared the perfect life, she was haunted. By what, she didn’t know. In her very first session of MDMA therapy, she uncovered memories of childhood sexual abuse by a teacher during middle school.
Considering my book is also about the power of MDMA therapy, of course I tracked this book from the start. I remember the day it was announced with huge fanfare both on Publishers Marketplace and Oprah Daily. This was the first time I’d ever seen a book announcement that was already an Oprah Book Club Pick.
I read the book the week it came out.
I didn’t actually like The Tell. I found Griffin’s focus on the what and the who and the when, the least interesting part of the story. I recognize that we all cope the best way we know how and trying to craft a narrative that makes sense after such a disruption to what you thought your life was is a step on the journey. But the outward focus of getting justice rather than the inward focus of how do I heal from this trauma? is what didn’t resonate. It felt like we were missing the plot.
But when this piece landed, I felt sick to my stomach. Because no matter how you feel about Amy Griffin as a person, I don’t think this article makes any freaking sense. Not only that but it does immense damage, calling into question not just the healing potential of psychedelic therapy but also whether to believe women who come forward with stories of abuse. An article like this silences women. It shows them this is what happens when we dare to step forward, share our stories, and our deepest shame.
I’m not even sure why the New York Times decided to investigate. Here is what the reporters say were their reasons:
“But increasingly, readers have raised 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 take place in a public school without any adults picking up clues.”
These aren’t unjustified questions. But does it warrant an in depth article in the New York Times? So I went looking at the online reviews. Any successful book is going to have its detractors. This is just how it works. But even so, of the 5,000 reviews on Amazon, only 3% are 2 star. 1% are 1 star. Only six out of those one star reviews seem to question the veracity. On Goodreads, again only 1% of the reviews are 1 star. So how widespread was this questioning?
They then go on to quote one podcaster who covered this topic:
“This is a book that has been swallowed whole by the media industrial complex,” said Maureen Callahan, a sharp-tongued columnist, discussing the memoir on her podcast, “The Nerve.”
She added, “There is, on the other side of it, a guy who doesn’t have Amy Griffin’s money, power, resources.”
Let me provide a bit more detail about this “sharp-tongued columnist.” She writes for The Daily Mail, yes, the right wing tabloid magazine. She is also a bestselling author whose book was endorsed by Megyn Kelly.
This podcast does the same thing as the New York Times article. Attacks the author and questions the veracity of her claims, yet again tying it to #MeToo and how maybe we’ve gone too far in believing women. I could not even listen to much of this podcast because I found it disgusting, but I listened to enough of it to hear the host say that Amy Griffin built her success using her husband’s money to invest in companies. She implies that Griffin bought her friendships, the very same celebrity relationships that allowed this book to succeed. I kid you not, this female host compares what Griffin did with her company, G7 Ventures, to scalping. Investing in a company, befriending the female founder, and yes, hanging that scalp on her wall to utilize for her own purposes. (You can hear this at around 9:40 mark of the podcast).
So before I even go into the failures of this investigation, I question the need for it. But the problem I also have is that this investigation leads nowhere. These reporters draw no conclusions. They do not clear the accused’s name (which has never been disclosed because Griffin used a pseudonym). They do not provide any research on recovered memories. They just question the author as a woman and a survivor. Eviscerate a kind of therapy that is life-changing for many and needs to be legalized. For what? For who?
ICYMI I wrote about my experience with MDMA therapy here:
First, a note on what feels like an unnecessary focus on Griffin’s privilege and wealth. The writers call her in the title of the piece, The Billionaire, and in the second paragraph, “one of the wealthiest women in the country.” They utilize this information to try and discredit her, or perhaps paint her as an unsympathetic victim. If anything, this information shows Griffin had more to lose from writing this book than what she might gain. This article proves the point.
There is so much this article leaves out. To begin with, the fact that experiences of childhood sexual abuse are often repressed. “Total memory loss is most common in childhood sexual abuse, with incidence ranging from 19% to 38%,” Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score. There are many reasons for this, including that in instances of extreme trauma we tend to dissociate to survive. Which means our psyche leaves our body and we kind of float outside of it while the trauma is ongoing. Therefore, the memory does not get encoded the way it would if we were fully present for the experience.
This is incredibly adaptive, by the way. Just not when we are trying to prove something happened to us. (This is why survivors of sexual assault often cannot provide details of their assault. They disappear to withstand it. I was going to link to an article from The New York Times Magazine that covered this. But I no longer want to bring more readers to that publication).
Now let’s explore what is possible in MDMA therapy, something that is completely overlooked in the article. Dr. Gabor Maté writes in The Myth of Normal, “in adeptly led sessions and in safe circumstances, psychedelics can uncover and bring acceptance to pain and sorrows people have tried desperately to escape all their lives.” Yes, right there in his words about the power of these modalities is the fact that psychedelics can UNCOVER pain and sorrows.
Why is this? Some of the transformative properties of MDMA include that it removes the protective barriers we erect to keep us from uncomfortable information. It gets us underneath the stories we tell to the truth of how we feel, paired with an overwhelming sense of self compassion. Whether it is that you want to leave your marriage, or you have been glossing over the pain of your childhood, or yes, have buried deeply painful memories of abuse, MDMA is known in many circles as truth serum.
The New York Times also glossed over any data about MDMA therapy’s incredible potential. Despite it still not being approved by the FDA, in a recent study of 104 participants struggling with PTSD, “By the end of the 18-week trial period, 71.2% of the people in the MDMA-assisted therapy group no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, versus 47.6% of those in the therapy-plus-placebo group.”
It is being studied for the treatment of alcoholism, depression and eating disorders in addition to PTSD. What is so incredibly powerful about these treatments is they do not need to be ongoing. After a few sessions of treatment, the participants are yes, cured.
The writers of this article explore none of this, just continuously referring to MDMA as “an illegal drug.”
So experiences of childhood sexual abuse are commonly repressed. MDMA and other kinds of psychedelic therapy are known to help us uncover and process trauma.
Amy Griffin isn’t the only prominent, well-off celebrity talking about recovered memories of abuse after using psychedelics. Tim Ferris1 has opened up about how his experience with ayahuasca led to his recall of episodes of past childhood sexual abuse. He discussed this five years ago with Debbie Millman on his podcast that has millions and millions of listeners. No major news organization went after him, worried about the babysitter he says abused him repeatedly, checking the facts of his story, or looking for any kind of corroboration.
Here is the challenge with corroborating these stories. Who will do so? The abuser is unlikely to admit to their actions. It is rare for children to even tell anyone about the abuse. Because a) you have to have a trusted adult to go to and b) there is the fear of not being believed. Or c), perhaps even more heartbreaking, no one will do anything about it.
So these stories are swallowed. Survivors learn to endure.
This is in fact many times considered the true trauma. Not the experience itself. But the fact that they had no one to go to.
The only expert the New York Times interviewed was Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). He has been an advocate for the legalization of MDMA therapy for years. To be clear, he is a policy guy, not a therapist. He has a doctorate in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His PhD thesis was Regulation of the Medical Use of Psychedelics and Marijuana. Just because he is an expert on this kind of therapy doesn’t mean he is an expert on recovered memories. He is not a psychologist nor therapist. He was clearly caught off guard when approached by the New York Times. He likely felt out of his depth commenting on their inquiries.2
Note that Rick Doblin tried to reach out and amend his statements. The New York Times used his initial quotes anyway. They do not interview any other thought leaders on psychedelic therapy or recovered memories or childhood sexual abuse.
They do interview an unnamed advocate for assault survivors in Texas who said “reporting sex crimes can be especially challenging in a patriarchal culture.”
So to recap:
It is incredibly common to repress these kinds of memories.
Psychedelic therapy is known to help you get back in touch with your body and what it has been holding for years. This means repressed memories.
Please note Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, endorsed this book.
Griffin spent a good portion of the book interrogating whether these memories could be true. It isn’t that she took them at face value. She struggled with these questions as well.
Now we move on to the actions the New York Times took to discredit this woman. They sent Amy Griffin’s lawyer an 11 page list of questions. They went name by name in her middle school yearbook to find the “Claudia” in the book, a student Griffin suspected was also abused by this same teacher who she hoped might corroborate her story. They eventually meet for coffee and Claudia says, no nothing like that happened to her. While the reporters didn’t find Claudia, they found someone else.
“When contacted by a reporter, the woman wrote back that she remembered Ms. Griffin but was “unfamiliar with the book.” After she was mailed a copy of the memoir and read it, she said she was deeply unnerved. Some of the descriptions in “The Tell” of Ms. Griffin’s being assaulted are eerily similar to the abuse she herself endured, she said.”
The Times then spends several paragraphs describing this woman and her background and her claim that the stories that Griffin shares in The Tell are actually her stories of abuse from a different teacher.
I still don’t understand what the reporters were trying to insinuate with this interview. That Griffin learned of this story from this acquaintance and then later in her life convinced herself it happened to her? Why would this student confide in Griffin if it is clear that they are only tangentially connected?
Then the reporters obtained a copy of Griffin’s book proposal, in which she names another incident of abuse with a different person, a subject she chose not to cover in the book, and they CALLED HIM TO ASK ABOUT THIS.
Now, I haven’t seen the book proposal. I have no idea when she remembered this abuse, whether it was recovered during MDMA sessions or not. I don’t know why she ultimately chose not to include it in the book itself.
But to me, this is when the actions of the “investigative team” teeter on the edge of harassment. What did they think would happen? This man would say: yeah, I did that? Did they at all consider the potential position they were putting Griffin in? We don’t know if she confronted this person or not. Now they are sharing her story and confronting her potential abuser without her consent? Who is doing the abusing now? For women who have had their consent and agency robbed from them, to do this is particularly rewounding.
Finally, they end the story with the insinuation that IF this teacher did this to Griffin, more people would have come forward. There is no way she was the only one.
But let me ask: Why would someone else come forward? To corroborate her story? What if they repressed their memories? What if they didn’t but they still had nothing to gain by coming forward and again, everything to lose? Only 12% of childhood sexual abuse is reported to authorities. And we wonder why this is when the New York Times publishes a piece like this.
One of the final “gotcha’s” the New York Times throws at Griffin is that she and her husband have invested in MDMA and that wasn’t properly disclosed. She does note on page 76 of the book that her husband “had become interested in psychedelic-assisted therapy, reading every piece of literature he could and eventually funding research into the subject.” The New York Times I guess expected her to explain exactly how much? Or perhaps to put a disclaimer in the front of the book on the same page as her trigger warning that the book contains depictions of sexual assault? As if she wrote this book to increase the chances of a return on their investment?
Here is the thing. When you have experienced the transformative properties of this kind of therapy, when you see how it can set you free from pain and stuckness that years of talk therapy was unable to, you want to spread the word. You want everyone to have access to this stuff. So you invest in it because the federal funding is nil. And yes, you write a book. Not to slam a teacher. Not for notoriety that you already have.
But to tell the truth and hope that your truth telling will help set others free and pave the way for more people to have access to therapy that literally saves lives.
But articles like this work to silence another generation of women. See, they think. It is never worth it. Just keep it to yourself. Pretend it didn’t happen. Go back into hiding.
And the men who abuse are empowered to do so because they know what happens to women who speak up.
Finally, a word on fact checking memoir and the publishing industry as a whole.
Memoirs should not be fact checked. We cannot fact check our memories. If we were required to, no memoir would ever be published. Just this week, The New York Times Book Review published a review of Michael Thomas’s memoir The Broken King. Thomas is the award winning author of the novel Man Gone Down. This is his first memoir. The review mentions that early in the book, “we learn he was raped at the age of 7 in a public restroom while in summer camp.” He evidently doesn’t tell his parents until decades later. I haven’t read the book to know whether the author held onto those memories all those years or if they resurfaced down the line. But is someone going to ask Thomas to provide proof? Did they fact check his book? Will someone discredit his book if he cannot provide documentation for his trauma?
I understand that much of The Tell was focused on this teacher and what he did and bringing him to justice. Griffin was not able to do so. Perhaps you think this book was her attempt to right the wrongs he did to her. But I think she wrote this book because she felt she could withstand the blowback. She has connections. She has money. She can hire the lawyers to defend her. Can we consider that rather than seeing her wealth and status as a strike against her, it allowed her story to come to light so that others may follow? That perhaps she used her status to pave the way, rather than steal the limelight?
So many writers have jumped on the bandwagon to discredit her, especially because she used Britney Spears’ ghostwriter (to be clear, he was one of three to five professional writers who were brought in to help bring that book across the finish line).3 But as a ghostwriter myself, I will tell you just because someone utilizes my expertise knowing how to write a compelling tale doesn’t diminish the truth of their account. And to imply that someone who has help to tell their story doesn’t deserve to have their story heard is just misguided. This is the publishing industry. Books are often commercial products rather than art. We writers wish that wasn’t the case, but it is. We must make peace with it and not bash the very books that help publishers take a chance on the rest of us.
Publishers will not stop requiring platforms and connections to publish books. This is how they make money. You can think it is ridiculous that she received a huge advance for this book. You can hate how much power Oprah and Reese and Jenna have. I agree that the rollout was insane. I had never seen that many celebrities hop on board to praise a book. But none of that is this woman’s fault. The publishing industry is built on authors who can bring their own connections and sales channels to the table. Every now and then they take a chance on a small author whose book goes on to sell well. But those are the exceptions not the rule.
Again, my question is: what did this article accomplish? Is that teacher truly exonerated by this piece? No. All that happened is two reporters tore down a woman who was brave enough to use her platform to highlight not just this transformative therapy but the reality that yes, this happens all the time right under our noses. We all wish that wasn’t the case, but it is. The more we allow journalism like this that attacks and discredit survivors that come forward, the more it will continue.
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FURTHER READING:
As the veracity of recovered memories could be an entire post in itself, I leave you this well researched piece published this summer before this controversy arose:
Tim Ferris has also donated to MAPS, like Griffin and her husband.
I had this happen to me back when I was an editor at HarperCollins. The New York Times reporter was claiming my author, who was in his eighties, had been manipulated by his ghostwriter into claiming he now believed in god (he was formerly the world’s most famous atheist). I still remember that conversation on a hotel balcony in LA even though it happened twenty years ago. They called out of the blue and then used my very unprocessed thoughts to discredit my author.
Also, sadly, he isn’t really a ghostwriter. I find no other books listed that he has worked on. I’m not sure who recommended him to her, and as a ghostwriter myself, I was dismayed she didn’t find a woman to help her tell her tale, and ideally someone who was trauma informed.
I wish I could give you a standing ovation. Thank you for this analysis and I couldn't agree more. This is not the first time female NYT reporters have done this and it enrages me.
Thank you for putting this out in the world. This is my favorite piece of your writing. Yes- because of how passionate I am about the benefits of MDMA therapy, and believing survivors, but also because this is strong, fiery, brave writing. 🔥💪