Has anyone read The Tell by Amy Griffin?

NYTimes lengthy article non paywall in link below 9/24

The Billionaire, the Psychedelics and the Best-Selling Memoir

Amy Griffin wrote a book based on recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Oprah Winfrey and a slew of celebrities promoted it. Then questions arose.

I thought he was really good on Matlock.

[quote] “If you tell anyone,” she says he told her at one point, “I’ll rip your teeth out.”

That sounds plausible!

I subscribe to the NYT, so if you want to read the article, just yell, and I'll post a NYT gift link. The link above didn't work for me.

"Recovered memories" are bullshit

I knew a family that endured a "recovered memory" nightmare......

Very interested to hear Datalounge's take on this

I hate to question anyone’s story, but this is just so hard to believe. How do you bury something so traumatic that happened to you well into your teens? Maybe that sounds insensitive to ask, but it’s a very strange for such a smart and high-achieving person.

The only people we want to believe actually experienced CS A are ones wiho claim to have exotic experiences like multiple personality disorder or recovered memories. People who just remember being abused and want to talk about it are called liars and snowflakes and told to shut up.

I thought we learned in the 80s pretty thoroughly that you could not believe memories only recovered in therapy with all the satanic cult panic and all the multiple personalities nonsense. It became very clear that highly suggestible patients were creating sensational memories because their therapists wanted to hear them, and they wanted to please their therapists.

I'm ashamed of the celebrities supporting this woman's memoir since the accusations are (by the woman's own admission!) unsupportable and there's no evidence.

Recovered memories are bullshit. Was her abuser named and prosecuted?

How can someone so successful be so nuts?

R9 I'm right there with you. Here's the discredited best seller from 1980.

Pardon me miss, but with all due respect, I have problems of my own.

The abuser couldn’t be prosecuted because the crime was committed too long ago.However the police reached out and no other victims of the teacher have ever come forward. Which is rare when it comes to this behavior, In a court, memories recovered while using psychedelics could never be used as evidence.

Also she’s a heavy investor in the company making the psychedelic she used to regain her memories. So lots of conflicts of interest.

I usually assume anyone propped up by Oprah is a fraud.

Every TODAY show gal was pushing this book. Along with most other “important women in media.” Without any digging, diving or questioning…the business is a gimmick.

How dare you assume that, r14! We are all as genuine as genuine can be.

Back in the 90s, a therapist tried to convince a friend of mine that she had been sexually abused by her father and needed to undergo recovered memory treatment. She had issues with her father, but abuse was definitely not one of them.

Yes, she's a fraud. I just read this article this morning and I was furious about it. The oligarchy protecting itself once again.

[quote]How can someone so successful be so nuts?

She married a billionaire. Her "success" stems entirely from that.

Yea—they buried the lede.

Her “$” is either her parents or her husband. She did nothing but go to UVa🥱

She was probably one of the richest if not the richest girl in her city. So an odd person to abuse.

Also, there is no doubt that people in that town know exactly who she is talking about, which likely fucked up his life.

I agree with the other poster that said her investment in the product makes her ineligible to promote. I'm not saying I don't believe her but due to her affiliation with the company I can't take her seriously. I have had friends do EMDR therapy and they realize childhood shame or situations that caused the shame have had effects on their feelings of worth and relationships yet they are high functioning achievers. It could be why some people are never satisfied???

First there was a vogue for recovered memories, with Sybil and the Three Face of Eve. Then in the 90s a bunch of investigative journalists proclaimed it fake, that these memories were planted by therapists, and won the day for a few decades. Now it's finally clear that yes, some of these memories may be false. And some may well be true,. In fact, it's more likely they are true than not, as the brain is an amazing instrument we know little about -- but we do know that it knows how to cover up pain when it needs to.

This and Elizabeth Gilbert’s new “memoir” - rich women making up stories about how hard they have it. Sorry - you have millions so you don’t get to play victim.

R22 you’re a whore, aren’t you?

A side aspect of this is how corrupted the publishing industry can be when it comes to money. Very wealthy people can buy their way into book success. The industry eats it up because the industry is struggling and every agent/editor/publisher is lured by someone whose money and influence will guarantee fawning praise from the elite. It’s happening more and more as people read less and less.

[quote] Rick Doblin, the country’s leading advocate for the therapeutic use of MDMA, said he connected Ms. Griffin to her therapists. In an interview this summer, he said he read several drafts of the book and called it “important.” But he played down the reliability of memories retrieved with MDMA, saying they are often “symbolic.”

Well, yeah.

My eyes initially saw this as Andy Griffith and was shocked.

Andy faked his own molestation!

I was annoyed by the Times’s assumption that readers would OBVIOUSLY know who in hell this lady is.

Eh— they did a tactful jab at cutting her while burying the lede.

We got the gist — clearly, there’s more to come.

r5 What profession/background are you in?

What more, R31? I’m intrigued.

I was molested.

R33 did you read the Times article? She’s made a fool out of more than a dozen “leading” women in media. “Today,” by itself, comes across as the most craven media workplace in Manhattan.

This sounds like a bunch of crap. And why the hell would anybody want to 'recover' traumatic memories long-ago stagnant and buried?

Feelings are like treasures.... so bury them!

She made sold Hello Sunshine for Reese Witherspoon and organised investment for Goop. I imagine she is very convincing to talk to.

Because the recovered memory of her rapist flushing her head down a toilet would give me pause.

A couple things struck me as weird.

The author was a perfectionist and assumed that something bad must have happened to her to make her a perfectionist. Doesn't a large percentage of the population have perfectionism or some other anxiety disorder? It seems like some people's brains are just wired that way, and it's now always the result of abuse. But she took a drug and then focused on finding the trauma that caused her perfectionism. She ordered her brain to find something.

When the Times sent a list of questions to the author's lawyer, the lawyer responded with: “the mere sending of this document has caused additional trauma and extreme physical and emotional harm to a survivor of sexual assault, which is inexcusable.”

But...later the Times used a yearbook to identify the author's fellow students and called some to ask if they were aware of anything that was going on. One classmate said yes, she was abused by a different teacher multiple times, including at the same dance as the author. The author's lawyer told The Times that the newspaper had been “duped by a fabulist” and threatened to sue, pointing to discrepancies between what Ms. Griffin wrote and what the classmate told The Times. The lawyer also questioned the woman’s truthfulness in asserting that she was abused by a teacher in middle school: “Anyone who read the book could claim (falsely) to have” memories of abuse that align with what Ms. Griffin wrote, he said, calling the classmate “a liar.” Merely telling a story of abuse, Mr. Clare continued, is “not proof or corroboration.”

What? So, it's OK to dismiss the account of the classmate, but it's not ok to even question the author?

I believe it!

R38 thanks for summarizing

I'm not sure I still quite get it all.

I have an extremely difficult time believing that anyone in their teen years would have suppressed memories to the extent that they were completely forgotten until they came back while in an MDMA-induced state. And I'm a woman.

She seems like an oily car salesman who can talk anyone into believing anything.

If the brain did hide memories like that, it seems more realistic that it would reveal them unexpectedly, perhaps when triggered by a sight, sound, or smell. But on command?

[quote] What? So, it's OK to dismiss the account of the classmate, but it's not ok to even question the author?

Like Holly Golightly, she may be a “genuine phony”.

This exchange with her and Drew Barrymore made me realize this woman is probably jacked up on her on Kool-Aid.

I dunno: if I was molested as a young person I don't think I would tell anybody. It would be like getting victimized again, every time I told someone.

But to each his own..

[quote] She explains her high achievements as trying to fill the hole.

We all understand that, but I'm wondering which hole.

I'm VERY skeptical about 'repressed memories', especially at a middle school age.

To me, the interesting issue here is “recovered” memories. I am not sure if I believe in them or not. Most instances seem fake - like Deja vu or similar “I’ve been here before” sensations that aren’t real. I’ve tried in the past to “uncover” memories - and realized it was an exercise in convincing myself I was a victim. Not helpful to my mental health.

Drew Barrymore needs professional help alright…that clip is scary.

You couldn’t make this up: an extremely wealthy woman, tired of being perfect and happy, magically acquires victim status by appropriating the abuse experiences of a former classmate. She then leverages this into greater wealth and celebrity. Grotesque.

Why Jack Cassidy's Autopsy Was So Disturbing

Dearly Departed Tours with Scott Michaels

^^whoops

R52 is the ghost of Jack Cassidy nodding off with a lit cigarette.

R50 - Hmmm. My next series on Netflix! I wonder if Sarah Paulson is free...

I had one supressed memory come back spontaneously. As a teenager, my abusive shitstain of a bf was terrorising me for hours and at one point burned a pencil sketch my grandather had given me, that he’d drawn when he’d helped man anti-aircraft guns in Liverpool during the Blitz.

For years it bothered me that I had no idea where the sketch was - I’d keep looking for it. One day, in my thirties, I just remembered. The trauma had been so severe, I’d buried it.

That was ONE event, though - not multiple events over time. That I find hard to believe, though the phenomenon itself is real 🤷🏻

I love that’s she’s lying about sexual abuse and claiming that people who question her harm all victims by making them less likely to be believed. What a nut.

^ She's rich, dear. That makes her eccentric.