I went on Hot Mics with Billy Bush this week to discuss the Amy Griffin case (or cases), and the controversial topic of psychedelics and recovered / false memories. Can MDMA and other psychedelics ever lead to people recovering memories of childhood abuse, Billy asked me, and how reliable are those memories? And can anyone ever be encouraged to believe they were abused by a therapist or guide?
If you haven’t been following the Amy Griffin cases, here’s a summary:
Amy Griffin is a very wealthy New York investor and socialite, successful in her own right, and married to John Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund investor. In March last year, Amy published The Tell, a memoir about how she had, during some underground guided MDMA sessions, recovered memories of years of abuse by a school teacher. The book was a bestseller. The teacher in question was, apparently, identified in Amy’s home-town of Amarillo, Texas.
In September 2025, the New York Times published a long article by two journalists, casting doubt on Amy’s memoir. The journalists reported various concerns: first, the book was never fact-checked; second, there were no police reports about that teacher in all his years of living in Amarillo; third, psychedelic recovered memories can be unreliable; finally, and most explosively, a contemporary of Amy’s from the same school said that the accounts in the book were ‘eerily similar’ to her own memories of being assaulted by a different teacher.
That source (she’s since been named as Jolene Altum) then alleged in a law case that Amy Griffin had duplicitously sourced and used her memories in the memoir. In March 2026 Jolene brought a law case against Griffin, her ghost-writer and her publishers for intrusion, invasion of privacy, publication of private facts, negligence and infliction of emotional distress. Griffin denies the allegations and has filed a separate defamation suit against Altum in federal court in Nevada.
There was a long sympathetic profile of Griffin in New York Magazine in October, which suggests that actually,
it was not true that Griffin had ever fully forgotten what happened to her. She knew, in a way she struggled to define — in a way she had worked hard to suppress — that she had been sexually abused…
The ‘recovered memories on MDMA’ angle was actually a bit of a stylistic choice to make the memoir a stronger read, claims ‘someone close to the process’. The MDMA, Griffin now suggests, ‘allowed her to look at these dark memories’...
As Griffin explained it now, the drug did not reveal new memories whole cloth but let her stop and face what she knew in fuller view. While on the drug, she was no longer afraid to look. Griffin told me that calling the memories “recovered”“was too simplistic.”
Ok, well…that’s quite a big shift on the eve of various law-suits, and that could be because courts, historically, have taken quite a sceptical view of recovered memories, especially drug-induced recovered memories.
There’s been further dramas and high society confrontations, even before the court cases take place, and it looks like the story is growing, but there is still zero coverage of one important part of the story: the high-society underground MDMA guide. Billy and I got onto that topic, as well as the whole issue of people recovering memories of childhood abuse on drugs.
