TEASER: The Lie? // Amy Griffin's "The Tell"

A glossy, star-studded book launch. A memoir that rockets past 100,000 copies. Then a wave of silence from major reviewers, an investigative report, and a scientific debate that refuses to stay theoretical. We’re talking about Amy Griffin’s The Tell and the chaos that followed its triumphant debut, where celebrity endorsement meets the most contested questions in trauma psychology.

My friend, Colette, joins the show as a licensed marriage and family therapist to share her thoughts on it all!

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Xx, Alex

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Transcript

Bonus Episode Setup And Warning

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to a Babes in Bookland bonus episode. Thank you so much for supporting the show. My friend Colette is back with us today, and we're diving into Amy Griffin's The Tell. Normally we break down the good, the bad, and the commentary on our bonus episode memoirs, but the Tell is seeping in so much controversy, we're adjusting our format a little bit to focus on that. Buckle in. It's about to get wild. Today we are diving into one of the most explosive book controversies in recent memory. A story that touches on trauma, celebrity culture, MDMA therapy, repressed memories, and an accusation that has rocked the publishing world. We're talking about the TEL, the 2025 memoir by Amy Griffin, and the cascade of questions that followed its triumphant debut. Let's start at the beginning. Amy Griffin is not your average first-time memoirist. She's the founder of G9 Ventures, an investment firm that has backed a slew of women-centric brands and startups, including Goop, Spanks, and Bumble. She's a mother of four, the devoted wife of a billionaire ex-hedge funder, and a fixture in the Instagram tributes of the rich and the famous. Reese, Gwyneth, Oprah. They all sing Amy's praises. And in March of 2025, she stepped into a different kind of spotlight. Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bushhager celebrated Amy at the launch of her book tour, an event hosted by Mariska Hardigay at New York City's Ford Foundation building. Excerted in vogue and anoited by the holy triad of book sale boosters, it's so powerful, Oprah told the audience, that never before have I been anywhere where Reese Witherspoon's book club and Jenna's book club and my book club are all in the same room. The Tell sold more than 100,000 copies and spent four weeks on the New York Times hard copy nonfiction bestseller list. A critic for Kirkus called the book an important, wholly believable account of how long buried but profoundly formative experiences finally emerge. So what exactly is the book about? Amy writes that undergoing therapy using the psychedelic drug MDMA uncovered previously buried childhood memories of being sexually abused by a teacher at her middle school in Amarillo, Texas in the 1980s. I knew that these memories were real, Amy writes. My body knew what had happened to me. It was a story perfectly calibrated for the moment. A woman with everything, bravely excavating the darkest corners of her past. In an essay heralding Amy as one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2025, Reese Witherspoon wrote that she quote, watched as Amy bravely reached into the deepest parts of herself and after gaining access to repressed memories of abuse she faced as a child, embarked on an incredible journey of discovery, grief, and healing. Before we get further into it, here's a timeline of MDMA's journey from lab bench to therapy couch and the bumpy road in between. And yes, ecstasy is MDMA. It's sort of the street name for it, but it's also not the pure form, so that's the biggest difference that's highlighted in Amy's book. The Origins. 1912 to the 1950s. German chemists first synthesized MDMA in 1912 while developing other medicines, discovering it had unique psychoactive properties. The pharmaceutical company Merck patented it in 1914. It was then largely forgotten until the 1950s when it was briefly researched by the US government as part of the CIA and Army's chemical warfare investigations. The therapists discovered it in the 1970s. American chemist Alexander Shulgin was the first to document studies on MDMA's psychoactive properties, publishing results alongside Dr. David Nichols in 1978. Shulgin felt the drug could be valuable in therapy and shared it with his psychotherapist friend, Leo Zeff, in 1977. Zef was also so impressed that at his memorial service, it was said he had introduced MDMA to at least 4,000 other therapists. From 1977, MDMA was used in psychotherapy by a growing number of practitioners. Its main effect seemed to be suppression of the fear response, allowing patients to observe and reprocess painful memories. Another application was found in couple therapy as it enabled couples to communicate without their usual anxiety-driven limitations. Therapists called it Adam because they felt it returned patients to a more innocent state. The Golden and Secret Era. By the 1980s, more than 1,000 therapists were using the drug as a therapeutic aid, and an estimated 500,000 doses were given before its use became illegal. The therapeutic company actively tried to keep it under the radar. Therapists fought against MDMA's restriction and attempted to control the spread of information, hoping to complete enough informal research before it became public. The ban. The drug's growing popularity in clubs ended the quiet research era. The DEA announced an emergency ban in 1985 and classified MDMA as a Schedule I drug, claiming it had no medical value. The scheduling made it illegal to manufacture, possess, or distribute, essentially ending MDMA assisted psychotherapy in the United States. Switzerland continued limited research until 1993. The Revival. MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, sponsored the first clinical trial of MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD in 2000, with a pilot study of female survivors of sexual assault in Spain, though it was discontinued in 2002 due to pressure from local authorities. In 2004, the FDA and DEA approved the first U.S. clinical trial of MDMA in humans as an investigational new drug for the treatment of PTSD. 2010s, a landmark phase two trial in Charleston, South Carolina, found that 83% of PTSD patients no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis after MDA assisted therapy, versus 25% in the placebo group. In long-term follow-up, approximately 75% of patients still showed meaningful sustained reductions in symptoms, an average of three and a half years later. In 2017, a phase two clinical trial led to a breakthrough therapy designation by the FDA, a significant milestone indicating the treatment showed substantial improvement over existing options. The FDA rejection. Despite the promising data, the road hit a major obstacle. In a 2-9 vote, the FDA advisory committee voted against the effectiveness of MDMA assisted psychotherapy and voted 1 to 10, rejecting the notion that the benefits outweighed the risks. Key sticking points included concerns about the difficulty of running a truly blinded trial, participants genuinely know whether they took MDMA because of its effects, and questions about the durability of effects. Where things stand now. The FDA designated MDMA AT as a breakthrough therapy in 2017 and is requiring an additional phase three trial after rejecting the initial new drug application in 2024. Research is continuing into its potential for treating PTSD, depression, social anxiety in autistic adults, and alcohol use disorder. Okay, so now we've learned a little bit more about MDMA. Let's get into controversy number one. Even amid the celebrations, there were quieter voices raising their hands. The tell went unmentioned in the books pages of The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and even the Wall Street Journal. When one prominent critic was asked why a book this successful would not have been reviewed by a single one of her colleagues, she said, My best guess is that repressed memory is too blurry and contested for a critic to touch this with a 10-foot poll. Then, in September of 2025, the New York Times published a major investigative piece, and everything changed. The Times investigation, which included dozens of interviews of people in Amarillo where Amy went to school, found that after the publicity surrounding Amy's book, no other students came forward and no legal complaints were filed. That surprised both the detective Amy spoke to and a local victim advocacy counselor. Experts say prominent disclosures can encourage other survivors to speak out. One podcaster, Maureen Callahan, had actually been asking questions even before the Times piece dropped, as she put it in a July 2025 installment of her podcast, The Nerve. This is a book that has been swallowed whole by a media industrial complex. And there is, on the other side of it, a guy who doesn't have Amy Griffin's money, power, and resources. This book raises more questions than it answers. Maureen went further. Presumably, she says, we've got a violent sexual predator roaming around free in a small Texas town. And you would think someone with Amy Griffin's money and resources and power and celebrity army would be on fire about that. And at the heart of all of this is a deeply contested scientific question. Can traumatic memories be repressed for decades and then recovered, especially with the help of a psychedelic drug? The idea that psychological problems are caused by buried trauma has been widely spread in healing culture, thanks to global celebrity of therapists, but psychedelics can sometimes amplify your cultural expectations. Defenders of Amy point to the science of trauma. Writer Cindy D. Tiberios argued that Amy isn't the only prominent person to recover abuse memories through psychedelics. Tim Ferris has spoken publicly about recovering memories of his childhood abuse after an ayahuasca experience to far less scrutiny. But critics point the other direction. Clinical psychologists at the University of Nevada Reno studied the literature and concluded that, quote, there is a large amount of scientific evidence that clearly shows that repressed memories simply do not exist. Traumatic events are actually quite memorable. And then there's Rick Doblin, the country's leading advocate for therapeutic MDMA use, who also happened to connect Amy with her therapists and whose organization received a multi-million dollar donation from Amy's husband. When the Times asked him directly about memory reliability, Doblin said, whether it's real or not, meaning whether the incident actually happened, from a therapeutic perspective, it doesn't matter. A lot of times people will develop stories that help them make sense of their life. That quote sent shock waves through the book world. The man who helped set this whole therapeutic journey in motion was essentially saying the truth of the memory may not be the point. It might matter to the man Amy accused, and his family and her community. Clinical psychologist Jem Hopper offered a more nuanced take. He told USA Today, some ideas and beliefs could potentially lead Amy to recall something that didn't happen, but it also could be based in reality that something did happen to her and she finally felt safe to allow herself to be open to what it might be. Alright, my friend Colette is here to answer some questions that came up for me as I was researching this episode. And then we'll get to the second controversy. Hi, Colette. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast with me today. So nice to be here. Thanks for having me. Give everybody a little bit of your background, why you were the professional friend I turned to to discuss the tell.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist in California. We're gonna be talking about things related to therapy and repressing thoughts and memories and things coming up at a later point through we call it, what do we call it? Like psychedelic assisted therapy. Yeah, I that is what it what they're saying. Yeah, for sure. I haven't done it myself, but there's a lot of mixed feelings in the field around it.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

So Okay, very good. And I know that you work, you have your private clients, but you also work with young women who have been through some pretty traumatic situations.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Yes, yes, working in a dual diagnosis residential facility where clients will come in with um usually some substance use disorders along with some mental health things as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

Okay. I know you didn't get a chance to read The Tell, which full disclosure to all the listeners, yeah, I was a few chapters in when the second controversy broke, which we'll get to, and I couldn't bring myself to finish it because I was kind of angry about all that. But I did skim the rest of it, and the book is really well written and compelling. I completely understand why it took off like it did. I was still at the very beginning the mysterious part before she tried MDMA. She takes us through her childhood, her running background, a few moments from school, and then fast forwards to her being a mother of two tween teenage-age girls and feeling disconnected from her life, like something is off. She writes, it was an abundant life, a beautiful life, a life in which I knew there should be no real complaint. And yet, and yet, and yet, when did I begin to know that I was hiding something? I could not say. All I know is that I became aware that there was something deep within me, something unexplainable, something deep, but something that I couldn't touch, a thing for which I lacked language. It was always there. Okay, Colette, before we get into MDMA, I'd love to know how common is it in your clinical experience for people to have no memory of childhood trauma and then suddenly remember it as adults.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Yeah, it's definitely something we see sort of sensationalized in kind of movies and maybe entertainment. In in my clinical experience, it's not something that I've come across much at all. I think what's more common is clients kind of beginning therapy or beginning kind of healing or beginning to sober up and then sort of slowly reconnecting to memories and things that have happened to them. But this kind of like unveiling of like a sudden repressed memory that's not something I've seen commonly at all. Have you ever seen it? Not in the way that it feels like it's being described in the book.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

This has been a teaser of our bonus episode on Amy Griffin's The Tell. To hear the rest of this episode, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or purchase this episode on Patreon.