Amy Griffin, The Tell: An Update On The Dueling Lawsuits. The Latest News

All right, an update on the dueling lawsuits involving Amy Griffin, author of the best-selling book in March of 2025, The Tell, interviewed by Oprah and all the literati. It was a sensation. And Jolene Altom, aka Jane Doe, but that's sort of gone now. The legal back and forths between these two continue based upon Amy's recovered memories of childhood sexual trauma. And of course, Jolene, Jane Doe says, no, those, in fact, are my memories that you have hijacked. There are no trial dates set yet. But the last we discussed, the judge told both legal teams, both sides to confer, that is get together and sort of decide on some ground rules as to how we're going to proceed in discovery. That failed. All right. There's one update. Amy's response to Jolene's Nevada, federal Nevada lawsuit, anti-SLAPP, is due today, Monday, the 31st of August. She's been trying to extend this deadline so she can do more discovery. Amy is proposing she wants depositions now from New York Times writers, Katie Rossman and Liz Egan, the ones who did a massive investigation into Amy's claims, which one year ago, almost to the day, Dominic Price, who was a contestant on Temptation Island 2. But, you know, Jolene wrote down that this is a person that contacted her looking for her personal story for a possible, you know, streaming series or some type of intellectual property and gleaned all of her personal information, which she says then ended up in Amy's book a little too closely. Also, Amy wants depositions from Tanya Vandenbosch, a woman who lived as a girl in the foster home with Jane Doe when they were kids and who corroborates that Jolene borrowed a dress from Amy for the eighth grade dance where terrible things happened to her and then helped her clean that dress. And then Brian Jennings, the boy that took her to that eighth grade dance where Jolene says she was assaulted. And LaRonda Barnett, who worked with Jane Doe in her later life, in of all places, a home that supports children who are the victims of adult sexual abuse. So now Amy wants depositions from all these people to stretch and to stretch. And of course, this, you know, this delays things in a massive way. It doesn't seem like the settlement I thought was coming is coming. People are dug all the way in. Amy is dug all the way in. She has massive resources to fund all legal activities. So Jolene has filed a motion to compel further discovery. She wants and by the way, I bounced back and forth between Jolene and Jane Doe because she was Jane Doe until Amy in her federal suit named her Jolene. So her legal team is filing a motion for the postcard, which in the book, if you read the tell, Amy says she received a postcard in the end that sort of ties everything together. She thought it was from the girl Claudia in the book, who is her inspiration and her spiritual soulmate, someone she thought was also assaulted because of what she saw in her behavior back in eighth grade. So they want that postcard. Amy can't have thrown that away. They want to compel the identity of Mr. Mason, who was the Gary suit pseudonymized, but the man in the book who is the teacher, Amy alleges assaulted her for years on and off. Real Claudia, Amy says, no, Jolene, you're not real Claudia. It's this different person, but she's fighting very hard not to reveal her. Jolene's legal team wants to unredact the redactions of which there are many to disclose financial interests in MDMA psychedelic therapy companies with specific dates that Amy used the drug. Amy, for her part, has filed a massive ex parte motion, a one sided emergency relief filing. Basically, she filed it on August 27th. It's an expansive protective order designed to shield Amy, they say, Claudia's lawyers, not the people that she is named. Jane Doe, Jolene moved to oppose that. The judge will likely side with Jolene on this and deny the ex parte because there's no trial date set. There's no reason for an emergency. We're still mired in all this discovery back and forth. Amy is really dug in her heels on this and is trying to legally outlast the competition. Jane Doe argues that Amy Griffin is now litigating discovery and protective order issues in both forums, the California case, where she is the defendant, and the Nevada federal case where she is the plaintiff and trying to do so simultaneously. What do we call this? Dizzying the field, flooding the zone. That's what they that's what they allege. Anyway, because Amy Griffin publicly described and published much of the material like, you know, investigation work and therapy sessions and all these drafts. All these things are part of the book itself. Jane Doe's legal team says she waived privacy and privilege claims over a protective order. Why are we trying to do that now? You wrote about all this stuff. And they say specifically, Claudia should not be sealed because she admitted that she was not abused. Amy wrote about it in her book. She met with whom she says is the real Claudia and was told by her face to face in a coffee shop in Tennessee that she was not abused. The concession by Jane Doe's legal team is, look, if you want to keep the identity of the real Claudia, you know, under pseudonym and the man who you allege, you know, abused you in such fashion for four years, graphically violently abused and raped her. That person, I think, you know, Jolene's showing a little sympathy here because she's like, yeah, maybe he should be his real name. If you want to just call him Max Simon, they say that'll be OK. So maybe this guy's had so many identity. In the original proposal, he was Mr. Miller. And then in the book, he became Mr. Mason. In one of the proposals, his actual real name was given. So they're trying to compel that identity. I know that identity. Both legal teams know the identity. It's just whether or not the judge is going to be able to hear this. I'm sure he knows the identity. It's just whether or not it's on the record. Anyway, Amy, why is Amy going so far out of her way not to give up the real Claudia's identity and her name? I think Jane Doe's side would probably surmise that the reason is, is because she's just a pawn, not actually a real person. She was a creative license used to help tie together or lend credence to Amy's claims that she wasn't alone, that there was this person and it sort of really helped her get to MDMA and realize these things. OK, a big date is September 30th. A big hearing is scheduled on Jane Doe's motion to compel and what is being sought here. And it will be decided on that day. They want complete book manuscript drafts and revisions showing how the Claudia material kind of evolved over time. They want all communications with Amy's ghostwriter, Sam Lansky. I think that's massively important stuff here because you're going to people want to know, was there communications where Sam Lansky is talking to the publisher or in the publisher saying, yeah, we need to punch this up. It's a good look at what kind of creative license was taken in a book that's called a memoir, not a loosely based on or fiction. They want investigator materials and transcripts like what investigators found, what the police sergeant who interviewed Amy back in the day, his notes. They want the postcard that Amy says she received from the real Claudia. They want MDMA therapy recordings and notes, which I assume would be privileged. That's kind of HIPAA, even though an MDMA facilitator is not a doctor. They want Amy Griffin's financial investments in MDMA therapy companies, like I said, like Lycos and Resilient, two companies that Amy's husband invested in. Lycos, I think, became Resilient. Anyway, they also want the original book proposal unredacted. The proposal that I saw was very heavily redacted. California's Discovery Act does not allow a party to black out portions of a document without a privilege log that comes with it identifying exactly what is being withheld and why. Jolene and her lawyers allege that Amy did this at scale. Again, what I saw was like a sea of black. Broad point being made by Jane Doe and her lawyers, because Amy Griffin publicly described and published much of the material, the drafts, the investigator work, the sessions in the book itself, they argue she waived privacy and privilege claims over it. Let me reiterate that. Also, they want any NDAs that were handed out and signed by Amy's lawyers to people. For example, we have a report that an NDA was handed out to the volleyball coach who was friends with the teacher that Amy alleges abused her. That person allegedly signed one. Did the other male figure who assaulted or raped Amy, as she alleges in her book, a guy, a character by the name of James, who when she was 20 years old and studying abroad for the summer, was connected with and says that he non-consensually had sex with her. Again, she went on, very well reported that she went on to date him. They were friends for 30 years afterwards, family, friends. This James, who everyone knows, the biggest problem Amy has when she made this a memoir and not loosely based on a memory, a fiction account, is that it's very easy to connect the dots and find out real identities. I know who James is. I'm 99.9% sure who he is. There is the idea that, did he sign an NDA? What others are out there? I can't imagine the teacher who, again, everybody in Amarillo knows which teacher she's talking about. It's easy to identify him. We did an interview with the boy who took Jolene Jane Doe to the dance and who witnessed her coming back ruffled and everything. He said there were only two teachers there, male teachers at that dance. It could be. In the end, Amy alleges it's one and Jolene says it's the other. The other, the one Jolene alleges, left town immediately as one you would expect would do after doing something as horrible as this. He can easily be tracked. He's alive and he knows what's going on and he's out there. The next also legal event is Thursday this week, Thursday, September 3rd. There's a hearing on the protective order, like what can be shared, what can be filed, what's for attorney's eyes only, what has been redacted, basically a ground rules hearing because they could not confer. The conference of the two legal teams was a failure. Like I said, it seems we're past the point of settlement. I thought Amy would settle in all of this because she's got such a mountain to climb when it comes to corroborating these events. So now that settlement seems to be off the table, I just think this cannot, will not end well. All right, there's your update on Amy Griffin and please hit subscribe on Add Hot Likes with Billy Bush on YouTube. Thanks for watching.