The Substance

In March, a new memoir introduced Americans to the most popular woman most of us had never heard of. It was a lot to take in. Here was a flesh-and-blood example of the kind of woman you usually only glimpse in Elin Hilderbrand novels — only richer, more beautiful, more powerful, and more celebrity-beloved.

Amy Griffin is the founder of G9 Ventures, an investment firm that has backed a slew of cool, woman-centric brands and startups including Goop, Spanx, and Bumble. She’s a mother of four; the devoted wife of a strapping blond billionaire ex-hedgefunder; and a fixture in the Instagram tributes of the rich and famous (Reese, Gwyneth, Mariska: they all sing Griffin’s praises). She also happens to have the build and coloring of a flute of champagne — long, lean, and golden — and the budget to hire not just the ghostwriter who helped pen Britney Spear’s bestselling memoir, but also a PR firm that reps, among other clients, Bose and Rihanna, to help promote her book when it came out. (Bustle’s parent company, Bustle Digital Group, is a client of the same firm.)

In her book, The Tell, Griffin writes that this seeming perfection was hard won, something she was raised to strive for, and did — as a college athlete, a mother, an entrepreneur. Indeed, the word perfect appears 71 times in The Tell. “People often told me that I had the perfect life,” she writes. “I was athletic, tall, and blond. John was successful and respected in his career… It was an abundant life, a beautiful life, a life in which I knew there should be no real complaint. And yet, and yet, and yet.”

The point of the book is that things that look this good rarely are. In it, Griffin recounts vivid, horrifying episodes of childhood sexual abuse by a male teacher that she says happened when she was a middle schooler in Amarillo, Texas. For decades, she says, she had no inkling of these memories. But several years ago, they came to her in crushing, cinematic detail, via the latest psychological optimizer of the Sun Valley set: MDMA, otherwise known as ecstasy, Molly, or E — a Schedule 1 drug that, despite its growing popularity among the cognoscenti, is still illegal to possess or consume recreationally.

If you were seeking the perfect vehicle to bring psychedelic therapy out of the fringe and into the light of day and help it shed any lingering Timothy Leary-esque associations along the way, you couldn’t do better than straight-as-an-arrow, law-abiding, responsible Amy Griffin.

For six months, it appeared The Tell had done just that. The first book ever to receive the combined endorsement of Oprah, Reese, and Jenna — the triple crown of celebrity book clubs — The Tell bucked the current market realities of publishing, in which nonfiction by non-celebrities struggles to make a ripple. This memoir by a first-time, previously unknown author debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to sell more than 100,000 copies. For a while there, the only remaining questions seemed to be: How was Griffin going to wield this new platform as a deep-pocketed survivor and mental health advocate — what kind of foundation or org did she have up her sleeve? And: Would Nicole Kidman play her in the movie, or would it be Griffin’s real-life friend Laura Dern?

Then last month, two reporters from the New York Times pulled the red carpet out from under The Tell, dropping a months-long investigation into Griffin’s claims against her alleged abuser (who is given a pseudonym in the book) and the questions that some readers and members of the Amarillo community had begun to ask.

The story was a shock. But the absence of proof is a feature of The Tell. In it, Griffin writes about how she recruited a private investigator in Amarillo to search for evidence, as well as a team of lawyers to open a criminal case against the teacher. Eventually, she learned not only that the timing of her allegations exceeds Texas’ statute of limitations for bringing charges, but also that no one, including former teachers and classmates, could back up her allegations. “There was no smoking gun, no physical evidence, no tangible proof,” she writes. “There had been no witnesses.” In the book, this presents a crisis of faith: Will Griffin herself be able to believe these new memories, with nothing external to support them? The Tell frames her choice to push past her doubts as a victory, a defining moment, and a lesson in self-belief that the book aims to pass on: “I trusted myself,” she writes. “That was enough.”

For many readers, it's easy to accept this self-belief. Griffin comes across as sincere in her vulnerability, in her belief that this really happened. After all, why else would she have exposed the rawest, most painful parts of her life in the book? But the controversy surrounding The Tell has reignited a larger, decades-old debate about “retrieved” memories — this time in the wake of the "believer her" ethos of #MeToo. It also throws cold water on the growing psychedelic renaissance, spotlighting persistent unknowns about these drugs’ ability to unlock the mind and “open” our memories, all of which comes as chemically-assisted journeys into one’s own past have become an increasingly hot ticket for those with the funds and access to try them.

In his 2019 Netflix standup special, Set Free, British comedian Simon Amstell talks about recovering blocked memories of devastating childhood molestation during therapy with psilocybin, or mushrooms. Actor AnnaLynne McCord has said she used the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca to unearth buried memories of childhood sexual abuse. In an emotional 2020 interview on his podcast, the author and lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss, an investor in MDMA research, shared that despite previously having no recall of his early childhood, at the age of 35 he excavated “crystal-clear memories of sexual abuse” by the son of a babysitter — recollections that “came back to me like a tidal wave” via a combination of ayahuasca, psilocybin, and meditation. In her 2023 memoir Midnight Water, Katherine MacLean, Ph.D., a one-time Johns Hopkins psychedelic researcher-turned-MDMA therapist, shares psilocybin-recovered memories of sexual abuse. The same year, the author and cancer advocate Andrea Wilson Woods described taking MDMA and experiencing “a Rolodex of childhood memories” that helped make sense of her unhappy upbringing.

Profound as these experiences sound, some researchers would like to pump the brakes. “I hate the idea of legitimizing the use of psychedelics to recover memories,” says Charan Ranganath, Ph.D., a professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology and author of last year’s bestselling Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Powers to Hold Onto What Matters. “MDMA has promise for treating traumatic memories in part because it can drive plasticity and change the memories. But using it in the context of recovered memory therapy presents very high risks for suggestion and creation of false memories.”

The Memory Wars 2.0

In The Tell, recovered memory — the notion that past events, particularly traumas, can be long forgotten and later resurface — is treated as accepted fact. In reality, it’s been up for debate since it caught fire in the public consciousness in the 1970s. That’s also when it became something of a women’s issue, as the women’s rights movement brought an influx of female academics and clinicians who dragged the issue of sexual abuse, particularly of children, out of the shadows for the first time, giving credence to the notion of buried, then regained, traumatic memories. You might say it was the original “believe her” era.

By the ‘80s, retrieved memory had become a pop culture mainstay, daytime TV fodder for the Phil Donahues and Sally Jessy Raphaels and, yes, Oprah Winfreys of the world, who filled the airwaves with freshly excavated memories — often of childhood sexual abuse. Oprah famously interviewed Michelle Smith, the author of the book Michelle Remembers, about enduring Satanic ritual abuse. Winfrey accepted Smith’s story without question. Later, the book’s claims were disputed and Smith’s credibility was questioned — but not before Michelle Remembers helped nudge the repressed memory craze to fever pitch, resulting in the “Satanic Panic,” a widespread conspiracy theory that maintained that America was rife with kidnapping, child-abusing cults.

When satanists proved a bridge too far, the pendulum swung. Memory experts and neuroscientists emerged to point to the dearth of proof for recovered memories. Some high-profile stories of recovered-memory abuses were recanted. In 2005, Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally called the recovered memory movement “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”

Yet plenty of people — maybe even most people — still believe in retrieved memory. What’s more, the same camps that battled this out in the ‘90s persist today, and they’re still led by some of the same key players. On one side, you have memory experts and neuroscientists, who increasingly agree with the memoirist and editor William Maxwell, who wrote that memory “is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.”

On the other, you have therapists and clinical psychologists steeped in the doctrine of the subconscious mind, who tend to be more inclined to respect a patient’s memories, which may have been unearthed during their sessions. A leading voice on this side of the divide is the psychiatrist and PTSD expert Bessel van der Kolk. Decades ago, he was an expert witness on behalf of people accusing their family members of abuse. Today, his trauma bible The Body Keeps the Score has taken up residence on the New York Times bestseller list, where it has sat for more than seven years. Van der Kolk’s theories that bodily pain can be a red flag for buried trauma — now a common theme in our culture — are echoed in The Tell. As Griffin puts it, “It was like my body knew something that I didn’t.”

In a study published last year in the peer-reviewed journal Memory, 94% of respondents expressed a belief in recovered memory, and 77% had faith in van der Kolk’s idea that the body stores hidden trauma. (Van der Kolk is also a key researcher on studies by the leading MDMA research group, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, whose investors include Tim Ferris and John Griffin, Amy’s husband, who has donated $1 million to the organization and is also a stakeholder in its for-profit offshoot.)

Van der Kolk blurbed The Tell, as did everyone from Gloria Steinem to Know My Name author Chanel Miller. The book was also covered in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and People. Curiously, though, it went unmentioned in the books pages of the The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and even The Wall Street Journal, an outlet that knows Griffin well: the paper published a splashy profile of her as a startup power player in 2022.

When I asked a prominent critic why a book this successful would not have been reviewed by a single one of her colleagues, she posited, “My best guess is that ‘repressed memory’ is too blurry and contested for a critic to touch this with a 10-foot pole?”

What We’re Recording — And Why

Research shows that the brain is hardly the trusty court stenographer we might like to believe. Whatever information it initially encodes is open to interpretation, and then gets edited and pruned over time, so that when we retell a story after the fact — whether to a friend, a therapist, or a police officer — it’s exactly that: our story. Even if we believe every word, we’re stitching together remnants, through the filter of who we’re telling this story to and why we’re telling it. (Some memory experts argue that traumatic memories — the kind that lead to PTSD — are hard to forget: A recent study found that painful, frightening events can be recorded in sharper detail than our regular, day-to-day experiences.)

In opposition to the van der Kolks of the world are well-known memory researchers — some of whom also happen to be expert witnesses called in by defense attorneys to cast doubt on the testimony of victims of rape and sexual assault. For decades, that field’s biggest star has been University of California Irvine psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D., an expert in “false memory” who has testified at the trials of Harvey Weinstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, O.J. Simpson, and the Duke University lacrosse team. In an interview with the Times U.K. after the Griffin investigation broke, Loftus summed up her role in these cases as skeptic-in-chief: When “people around me think the guillotine isn’t good enough for this bad guy, I’m sitting here wondering: ‘Is this real or not?’”

In the wake of #MeToo and its “believe women” rallying cry, this can feel like a tricky position for any expert — especially a female one — to take. Indeed, one source who declined to participate in this story said she feared that raising (or even echoing) any questions about the narrative of The Tell risked “victim shaming.”

Griffin’s defamation lawyer gestured to that persistent fear in his response to the New York Times’ list of queries. In a statement, he said, “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.” (Griffin herself did not respond to the Times’ queries, and her reps did not make her available to Bustle. Requests for an interview began in July.)

Social psychologist Carol Tavris, Ph.D., rejects that notion. “It is not unfeminist to question a woman’s story without corroboration,” she says.

In her landmark book on the power of cognitive dissonance, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), co-authored with Elliot Aronson, Tavris explores the way that human beings can unconsciously create fictions, often without intentionally twisting the truth, and often in order to absolve ourselves of responsibility — so that we can get back to believing what we need to believe: that we’re smart, good people. “You don’t have to be lying to be wrong — to be misremembering or confabulating,” she says.

Tavris sees the new era of recovered memory as history repeating itself, only this time, it’s “updated with a newer trendy drug — one that once again is claiming it can squeeze out those ‘buried’ memories.”

When I spoke with Manoj Doss, Ph.D, in early summer, he put it more bluntly. An assistant professor at University of Texas’ McGill Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy, he’s one of few — if not the only — American researchers who has specifically studied the effect of MDMA on memory. Noting the uncritical response that a recent case involving recovered memory received, even in the scientific community, Doss said, “I am a little afraid there's going to be a second coming of the Satanic Panic because of psychedelics.”

This is your brain on MDMA

It’s easy to see why MDMA is a party drug non-pareil. It makes you feel awake, energized, disinhibited, euphoric, eager to touch and be touched, and magnetically drawn to the people around you — sensual, if not exactly sexual. It also enhances mental imagery, though it isn’t as psychedelic as mushrooms or LSD. Some evidence suggests that while you’re “rolling,” MDMA dampens the emotional reactivity of the amygdala — the part of the brain that controls our fight-or-flight response — allowing us to experience stressful memories or thoughts without hitting the panic button.

The belief that psychedelics can flip our lids, shaking out previously hidden recollections, has a long and colorful history, and plenty of anecdotal support. But Doss says there’s no clinical evidence that these drugs help retrieve lost memories. Rather, some studies indicate psychedelics may help us alter emotional memories, making them more or less emotionally charged even after the drug wears off, so that we remember them differently — hence MDMA’s effectiveness, in conjunction with therapy, as a treatment for PTSD. In one MAPS study partially led by van der Kolk, 88% of the participants diagnosed with severe PTSD experienced a clinically significant reduction in symptoms after undergoing psychedelic therapy.

Doss warns against exalting the drug as a truth serum. “It might be able to alter memory representations retrieved under MDMA to the point where they're distorted from reality,” he says. “Hence the potential to falsely remember something that never actually happened.”

This is partially due to the drug’s tendency to enhance suggestibility, making us more prone to believe: “If you’re sitting around thinking about your childhood, trying to make sense of why you are the way you are, and you’re influenced by people to think that everything comes from trauma… well, what are you going to do?”

Last year, MDMA-assisted therapy appeared to be charging full speed toward FDA approval, but in August the agency turned it down, citing the need for more data. Even that setback seems unlikely to derail the burgeoning psychedelic renaissance. Ketamine, another psychedelic, is legal for therapeutic use in the U.S. — and even more widely associated than MDMA with recovered memories. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has joined certain of his MAHA followers in expressing interest in hallucinogen-assisted treatment as an alternative to mainstream psychiatric meds, and is now accelerating government-run clinical studies. (Ironically, because of psychedelics’ potential to ease veterans’ PTSD, it is Republicans — whose party spearheaded the “War on Drugs” that stalled out psychedelic research in the first place — who are now leading the charge in their favor.)

Psychological explorers who are planning to go there should think very carefully about who they’re hiring to lead them, says British writer and academic Jules Evans, founder of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, an NGO that researches the ethics and safety of these substances. Evans is hardly a skeptic. He believes that some psychedelic-induced memories are true — and should be verified after the trip — while others are not. “There are occasions when people go looking to uncover something, and psychedelics can amplify their expectations,” he told me. There are also times when the psychedelic therapist or guide, who administers the medication and acts as a spiritual doula of sorts for the experience, is either unethical or under-trained. In a lengthy Substack post, Evans and cowriter Erica Siegal carefully dissect an aspect of The Tell that the Times did not: Griffin’s interactions with her guide, a woman identified as “Olivia.”

In the book, it is Olivia who suggests that Griffin’s perfectionism is getting in the way of her self-belief. In searching for proof, Olivia argues, Griffin is treating her trauma like everything else in her life, “trying to create a perfect outcome.” Olivia tells her: “But this was never about arriving at a perfect outcome. It was never about proof. It was only ever about you with you. You trusting you. What you need — what you’ve always needed — is just for you to know it.”

For Evans and Siegal, this speech is one of a laundry list of possible red flags about their relationship, in addition to meeting in non-clinical circumstances and exchanging gifts. “Therapists and guides need to step carefully in how they respond to these experiences,” they write, “neither rushing to confirm someone’s memories nor rushing to deny them.”

Most forms of psychedelic therapy take place in an unregulated underground community, a scene popularized by America’s unofficial high priest of the practice, author Michael Pollan, who opened the floodgates by documenting his experience with guided psychedelic therapy in his 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind. “His message was, ‘Hey, do it with a professional,’” says Evans. “The problem is, you can't tell what a professional is in the underground.” Some guides are trained therapists and psychiatrists operating “off label” because they believe in the benefits. Others are far less qualified. And it’s not as if you can really check their qualifications. “You can't tell how many years of experience they have,” he says. “They may have a training certificate, but you don’t know how good that training program is. They have no ethical code, they have no license. And some of the practices are pretty wild.”

According to Evans, it’s not uncommon for a guide to downplay, or bypass altogether, necessary warnings about the downsides of psychedelics, including the potential to “become destabilized for months” after “a terrifying experience which leaves you feeling worse.” Amy Griffin’s account of emerging from her first MDMA session is heartrending: She’s devastated, broken, holding the pieces of her life like a shattered snowglobe. Thankfully, Griffin had the resources to get the intensive therapy she needed to survive that detonation. That wouldn’t be the case for many of us, Evans says. “If you’re not a billionaire, and you become destabilized after an underground experience,” it’s not unheard of for the guide “just to ghost you and say, well, just listen to the medicine.”

One woman I spoke with who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity described trying MDMA therapy in her late 30s to process childhood sexual abuse by a family friend — an experience she could hazily remember but had not reexamined through adult eyes. She says her therapist made it very clear in advance that whatever she happened to experience or see on the trip would be an emotional memory, not necessarily a factual narrative.

“It felt real,” the woman told me, “but it’s like analyzing a dream — it’s symbolic.” The experience proved helpful, giving her new perspective on her adult relationship to male attention, among other things. “I was able to say to my younger self: You were so little and really overwhelmed and scared,” she says. “I had never let myself feel how scary that was.”