SHOCKING: Amy Griffin Accused of Targeting Reporter's Children | Billy Bush

An update on Amy Griffin, the Amy Griffin story, which of course, after the wedding that I attended a couple of weekends ago in Hawaii, Jen Meyer and Jeff Ogunlese's wedding in Lanai, this story was pretty much everywhere that Amy Griffin kind of came at me at the reception afterwards. I'd only report on when there's news, but this is interesting. Ben Smith, the Former media reporter for the New York Times now is one of the proprietors and editors of Semaphore. He left the New York Times to start his own thing, as many do. Anyway, he wrote in Semaphore and that, I don't know, he was probably taking up for Katie Rossman, who is the New York Times reporter that, you know, Amy has been obsessed with. Outside of me, it's Katie Rossman. And Ben Smith, they used to work together. So Ben Smith wrote this. The New York Times article appeared on September 24th, 2025 under the headline, The Billionaire, the Psychedelics, and the Best-Selling Memoir. It was 4,980-word investigation by Katie Rossman and Elizabeth Egan. And it captured a wave of discomfort that had rippled from New York's publishing world to Amarillo, Texas' police department about a best-selling memoir by a billionaire pillar of Manhattan society. Amy Griffin's The Tell 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 ultra-rich. 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 the tell 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 been an exchange of snap messages between Katie Rossman's son, student at the University of Southern California, and a friend of one of Griffin's children. Messages reviewed by Semaphore were heated but respectful. The weekend after the story published, Amy and her husband, John Griffin, whose hedge fund was the source of their billions, were in the safe space of the super agent, Ari Emanuel's annual Aspen retreat called The Weekend. A person seated with Griffin in Aspen recalled her saying the Times had Sought to destroy her life and her family's. And then Griffin said something that shocked her interlocutor. The person recalled by calling into question Griffin's account, Rossman had made her and her children's life miserable. And she said she would do the same for the Times reporter's son. Griffin, through a spokesperson, heatedly disputed the claim. Amy Griffin has never threatened Katie Rossman's children or taken any action to harm Ms. Rossman or her family. These allegations are categorically false. The spokesperson cited the exchange of snap messages after the story published as this way. 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. That person asked a mutual contact to warn Katie Rossman, according to three people familiar with that exchange. Katie Rossman, in turn, alerted her employer. Then the New York Times General Counsel, their top lawyer, 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 Amy Griffin ever took any action against Rossman's son. But Griffin's focus on the Times story and other fallout has, acquaintances say, continued. The classmate, Jolene Altam, 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 Access Hollywood 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. She's 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 Katie Rossman, who didn't provide a comment to Semaphore 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 this conversation confirmed. In the conversation, Griffin asked the person to use that influence to deny admission to Rossman's children. A person with direct knowledge of the conversation said, Rossman's daughter is a senior in high school. The person did not act on that request. Ms. Griffin has never contacted anyone associated with any university or school regarding Ms. Rossman's children, said Amy's spokesperson. If these troubling reports are accurate, this is a stunning abuse of power, an influence wielded against the family of a journalist doing their 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 Statlander said in a statement, the Times reporting of September 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. Wow. And Ben, the writer, says, 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 would 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 Rossman, and the other did not act on Griffin's alleged suggestion to attempt to intervene in Rossman's daughter's college app. 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, 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. So New York Magazine described the unpleasant experience of being the target of the New York Times reporting from Griffin's perspective. Magazine also found a classmate whose disturbing recollection appeared to substantiate Griffin's story of abuse. Okay, there you go. That is from Ben Smith. And what's interesting to me is that Ben Smith is now on it. Okay. Normally Ben Smith Ben Smith writes, and I've commented on what Ben Smith wrote. This time, I delivered what I delivered, and Ben Smith is following up on it. And he is, I don't know, he's a real figure. I have to think that part of him, you know, I'm sure he has a good relationship with Katie Rossman. Even though she didn't comment for the story, maybe he felt like, yeah, I'll be defending her.