Times journalist’s children allegedly became billionaire memoirist’s focus
Semafor ·
Days after a New York Times investigation raised questions about Amy Griffin’s memoir The Tell, reporter Katherine Rosman received a worrying call.
The New York Times article appeared on September 24, 2025, under the headline .
The 4,980-word investigation by Katherine Rosman and Elisabeth Egan captured a wave of discomfort that had rippled from New York’s publishing world to Amarillo, Texas’ police department about a bestselling memoir by a billionaire pillar of Manhattan society. Amy Griffin’s told the story of a woman whose perfect exterior masked childhood trauma, and how the drug MDMA helped her remember and ultimately move past childhood sexual abuse.
The Times story turned her success into a parable about class and America’s new ultrarich. Most damagingly, the Times discussed the possibility that Griffin’s memory of sexual abuse might have been borrowed from a classmate who attested that stories in were “eerily similar to the abuse she herself endured” in middle school from a different teacher.
Some of Griffin’s friends suggested she shrug off the bad press. But she was livid, consumed by it, friends said. It was intensely personal: In the days after the story, there had even been an exchange of Snap messages between Rosman’s son, a student at the University of Southern California, and a friend of one of Griffin’s children. The messages, reviewed by Semafor, were heated but respectful.
The weekend after the story published, Griffin and her husband John Griffin, whose hedge fund was the source of their billions, were in the safe space of the superagent Ari Emanuel’s annual Aspen retreat, “The Weekend.” A person seated with Griffin in Aspen recalled her saying the Times had sought to destroy her life and her family’s.
Then Griffin said something that shocked her interlocutor, the person recalled: By calling into question Griffin’s account, Rosman had made her and her children’s life miserable — and she would do the same to the Times reporter’s son.
Griffin, through a spokesperson, heatedly disputed the claim: “Amy Griffin has never threatened Katherine Rosman’s children or taken any action to harm Ms. Rosman or her family. These allegations are categorically false,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson cited the exchange of Snap messages after the story published. “At an event shortly after publication, Mrs. Griffin was upset about the impact on her daughter and expressed those feelings in a conversation with a friend. Her words were later taken out of context and mischaracterized as a threat she never made.”
The person who heard Griffin’s comments in Aspen understood them as a threat, and said they felt obliged to act.
The person asked a mutual contact to warn Rosman, according to three people familiar with that exchange.
Rosman, in turn, alerted her employer. Then The New York Times’ general counsel, David McCraw, spoke to Griffin’s lawyer, Tom Clare, though the two men offered somewhat different versions of what was said.
There’s no indication Griffin ever took any action against Rosman’s son.
But Griffin’s focus on the Times story and other fallout has, acquaintances say, continued. The classmate, Joleene Altum, sued Griffin for emotional distress and invasion of privacy, and Griffin countersued for defamation in a bitter, ongoing legal battle. It’s been covered breathlessly on Instagram and by celebrity media — led by the former host Billy Bush, who last Monday on his podcast described being confronted by Griffin at a wedding on the Hawaiian island of Lanai.
“In my opinion,” he said, Griffin “is a woman who has become unhinged, tearing down innocent people, trying to ruin lives and careers,” he said. “She has attempted to blackball people from schools. She’s threatened to bankrupt media publications and individuals, including me.”
Griffin has also continued to focus her ire on Rosman, who didn’t provide a comment to Semafor for this story. Months after the disputed exchange at Aspen, Griffin spoke to a person in a position to influence admissions at a major American university, a person with direct knowledge of their conversation confirmed.
In the conversation, Griffin asked the person to use that influence to deny admission to Rosman’s children, the person with direct knowledge of their conversation said. Rosman’s daughter is a senior in high school. The person did not act on the request, they said.
“Mrs. Griffin has never contacted anyone associated with any university or school regarding Ms. Rosman’s children,” Griffin’s spokesperson said.
“If these troubling reports are accurate, this is a stunning abuse of power and influence wielded against the family of a journalist doing her job to report the news and follow the facts, simply because the subject of that reporting didn’t like the coverage,” New York Times spokesman Charlie Stadtmiller said in a statement. “The Times’s reporting of Sept. 2025 was a careful, fair and above all accurate pursuit of the facts that probed important questions about memory, the past, traumatic events and the state of memoir publishing.”
It’s tempting to see this story — as the Times did — as a parable of a billionaire class that has lost all moral moorings. But as I spoke to people in and around Griffin’s gilded circle, it was the opposite: Members of her social world were shocked by the suggestion she’d take revenge on a journalist’s children, and most found it wildly out of character. Some I spoke to said they couldn’t believe she meant what she said. One sought to warn Rosman, and the other did not act on Griffin’s alleged suggestion to attempt to intervene in Rosman’s daughter’s college application.
Indeed, even as America’s emotional and capricious billionaires inspire terror in its professional and middle classes, they seem at times more vulnerable to negative media attention than anyone else. The richest man in America, Elon Musk, has also at times appeared to have the thinnest skin, and embodies a generation of tech figures obsessed by what strangers say about them on social media. In some cases, they seem jarred by the gap between the unremitting positive feedback of paid courtiers and the harshness of the contemporary public square.
New York Magazine described the unpleasant experience of being the target of the New York Times’s reporting from Griffin’s perspective. The magazine also found a classmate whose disturbing recollection appeared to substantiate Griffin’s story of abuse.