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On September 24, 2025, the New York Times published a front-page story that attempted something highly uncharacteristic of the Gray Lady: A 5,000-plus-word report, four months in the making, that aimed to discredit a woman’s rape account. Behind the scenes, a former “Temptation Island” contestant also figured into the piece’s twisty backstory. His interview with the Times could have potentially blown up the investigative report, but was not included, according to court documents.
The target of the Times was venture capitalist and author Amy Griffin, whose best-selling memoir “The Tell” limns an adolescence that included being raped by a middle school teacher whose identity she veiled. The Dial Press book became a runaway success after hitting bookshelves in March 2025, with CAA quickly fielding interest for film, documentary and TV adaptations.
The Times story, which ran under the headline “The Billionaire, the Psychedelics and the Best-Selling Memoir,” painted Griffin as a sketchy dilettante and floated the possibility that she appropriated the rape story of a former classmate for her own literary clout. It rocked the publishing world and New York society and has spawned dueling lawsuits between Griffin and the former classmate that are heating up this summer.
But legal filings show that the Times omitted a key interview with Dominque Price — a breakout reality star from the second season of “Temptation Island.” The Price interview could have raised a red flag about the veracity of the former classmate, who was the Times’ sole source claiming that Griffin was a trauma thief.
The Jane Doe classmate claimed in a March lawsuit against Griffin that she was approached by Price in April 2022, and that he falsely represented 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 Griffin’s countersuit, filed last month, a Times reporter reached out to Price via text about 19 days before the story published, and the “confused” reality player agreed to talk to her.
In a declaration made under oath, Price said the journo, “asked me if I had ever worked for a casting or talent agency, and I told her truthfully that I had not. The reporter further asked me whether I was familiar with [Jane Doe] whose name I did not recognize. I was unfamiliar with all the topics the reporter asked about, and I suggested that she had contacted the wrong person.”
Price added in his declaration that prior to being contacted by the reporter, he had no knowledge of Griffin or “any involvement, direct or indirect” with anyone involved with “The Tell” or any persons acting on their behalf. “I did not participate in, contribute to, or provide services to any investigation, research, writing, or background-collection efforts relating to ‘The Tell’ or any book.”
Strangely, the Times story never mentions Price nor hints at sourcing that would contradict its Jane Doe. A spokesperson for the Times says: “Because we did not say Ms. Griffin misappropriated [Jane Doe’s] story, and did not include any theory about or even mention Mr. Price, the factual dispute over whether Mr. Price and [Jane Doe] spoke and when was irrelevant to our article. In her California lawsuit [Jane Doe] now disputes the facts provided by Mr. Price in his affidavit in the Nevada case. In other words, it is an open and unresolved factual dispute.”
Griffin’s attorney Eric Hageman at Clare Locke says of the Times: “Its reporters knew that Amy went to the police in August 2021, eight months before, [by Jane Doe’s own] account, Price began extracting her story for Amy’s use. Amy sat for a two-hour, recorded interview with the Amarillo Police Department, recounting in great detail the abuse described in ‘The Tell.’ Amy could not have stolen in 2022 a story she gave the police in 2021.”
Even more eyebrow raising, the Times acknowledged in its piece that it used unpublished material to out Griffin as an accuser to a second man — a family friend — without her knowledge or consent.
“The Times took a detail from a survivor’s confidential, private book proposal, used it to track down and confront her alleged abuser, then used his denial to seemingly cast doubt on her overall account,” says Erica Vladimer, founding director of Harassment-Free New York. “That’s not reporting; that’s a victim-doubting tactic that abusers themselves use. Survivors are always watching how the press treats other survivors, and this is exactly how you teach every one of them not to trust you with their story.”
A Times spokesperson says: “It is Ms. Griffin who identified him publicly. She cited him by name in her book proposal, which was shared with at least several dozen people in the publishing industry.”
Publishing professionals say a watermarked proposal that requires the signing of an NDA to review would be considered confidential.
Griffin’s countersuit claims the Times omitted another significant detail during its fact-checking: The Times story, which never directly quotes Jane Doe but instead paraphrases her, says she and Griffin had reconnected once in person “in recent years.”
While the timing is vague and the location is absent, Jane Doe’s lawsuit is more specific. She claims that the two women met in Palm Springs in 2019, and talked about “their past growing up in the Amarillo area,” but neither discussed their respective rape stories, which involved different teachers at the same middle school.
“The Times refused to give us this key detail before publication, saying only that the two had met in a coffee shop at some point before the COVID-19 pandemic,” Hageman says. “Had the Times simply provided the date and location, we would have quickly and gladly proven that Mrs. Griffin was not in Palm Springs in 2019. The Times hid all of this from us and now says that it does not care that [Jane Doe’s] story of theft was disproven before the article was printed. It is shameful that the Times refuses to retract a story it knows to be false.”
A Times spokesperson says: “In an article that largely focused on events from 40 years ago, ‘in recent years’ was a less confusing way to reference 2019.”
The litigation comes at a time when the newspaper is facing questions about its handling of Graham Platner accusers in a June story titled “Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior.” Former Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Guardian that “the story’s narrative approach — including a long lead-in from the perspective of the Platner campaign — was notably indirect.” That long lead-in arguably undermined accuser Lyndsey Fifield‘s allegations, which prompted a second accuser, Jenny Racicot, to go on the record with Politico and CNN’s Jake Tapper with her own Platner rape claim — something she had previously shared with the Times off the record. (Platner has denied both allegations.)
“If I had known about the Times’ pattern of egregiously mistreating women who are survivors of abuse, I never would have trusted them to report my story,” Fifield tells Page Six Hollywood. “Though the journalists are different, reading the Times reporting of Amy Griffin’s story of abuse reads eerily similar to the way they reported my own — weighed down with endless paragraphs of intentionally discrediting, extraneous details.”
A Times spokesperson says: “These articles have nothing to do with each other.”
The Griffin story is filled with tangents that are irrelevant to her core allegation of being raped by a teacher. The reporters fixate on her wealth and dub her “a scion” of the Texas panhandle because her family owned some 50 Toot’n Totum convenience stores at the time. The reporters continued to hammer on her station as the wife of hedge fund manager John Griffin, even detailing the price of the couple’s Upper East Side townhouse.
The use of MDMA therapy, which Griffin describes in “The Tell” as having helped her retrieve some of her abuse memories, is positioned as “a matter of debate.” (Vladimer says there’s no such debate in the survivor community about MDMA.) Standard book promoting efforts are spun as nefarious, like Griffin leveraging her network of A-listers to share their enthusiasm for “The Tell.”
One source familiar with the story’s reporting process suspects that Katherine Rosman, one of the article’s authors and also a memoirist, was “jealous” of the success of “The Tell,” which became a Oprah Book Club selection. “And so they went to Amarillo, and they knocked on all these doors and talked to all these people. And they couldn’t find anything because there is nothing,” the source says. (The piece was reported with Elisabeth Egan.)
“The Tell” sold roughly 25 times more units than Rosman’s own very personal 2010 memoir “If You Knew Suzy: A Mother, a Daughter, a Reporter’s Notebook.” (According to BookScan Griffin’s tome sold 75,876 hardcover copies vs. Rosman’s 2,745. Both titles are likely about 1.5 times higher given that BookScan doesn’t include audio or ebooks.)
A Times spokesperson says: “We know plenty of journalists who admire Katie’s work including this interesting and important story about a major event in book publishing.”
Griffin’s lawyers say in their countersuit that Rosman “indicated excitement at the prospect of taking down Mrs. Griffin,” and “doubted Mrs. Griffin’s story from the start, telling a source she could not believe that the child of a wealthy family could be violently abused without anyone noticing” — and that she and Egan asked “leading questions designed to elicit doubt.”
Ultimately, Griffin’s counterclaim says the Times appears to have set out to prove a thesis based on a hunch that a beautiful teenager who grew up on the right side of the tracks couldn’t have been raped. The story ends on the point that no other victims have ever accused the unnamed teacher, but the same logic would apply to their Jane Doe, whose alleged perpetrator was not alleged by the Times to have any other accusers.
A Times spokesperson says the reporters “applied the same rigor” into looking into the Jane Doe teacher, but declined to answer what they found or why they didn’t include that in their reporting. (The Times never addresses the possibility that both women were victims of sexual assault. Griffin’s teacher, whose identity is known by the Times reporters, has never publicly denied the claim.)
“The Times’ investigation began with its conclusion,” Griffin’s counterclaim states. “Its ‘reporting’ was a hunt for a reason to disbelieve ‘The Tell.’”
Meanwhile, the story’s subhead suggests that there was mass skepticism about the book, but can only point to one doubter by name: Podcaster Maureen Callahan, whose “The Nerve” is produced by Megyn Kelly’s MK Media. Instead of mentioning the Kelly ties, the Times describes her as “a sharp-tongued columnist,” and omits the publication for which she writes, The Daily Mail.
“Many people expressed doubts, not just Callahan,” a Times spokesperson says.
Some say the Times’ overall framing of the story has left a bad taste.
Publicist Vanessa Santos, who has represented the nonprofit PAVE (Promoting Awareness | Victim Empowerment) as well as several Bill Cosby accusers, says: “Between their reporting on ‘The Tell’ and their treatment of the Platner accusers, the New York Times is out of control with how they’re covering women.”
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