Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager looked ecstatic as they stood onstage at the Ford Foundation in Manhattan earlier this year, posing with a new book. The crowd was so large it required an overflow room.

The book was “The Tell,” a memoir by Amy Griffin, a first-time author and one of the wealthiest women in the country. Not only did Ms. Griffin receive the first-ever joint promotion by the three influential book club leaders, but Ms. Winfrey had selected “The Tell” as her 112th book club pick.

In the memoir, Ms. Griffin, 49, writes that she engaged in illegal psychedelic-drug therapy. While under the influence of MDMA, the active chemical in Ecstasy and Molly, she said she recovered memories of being raped on many occasions by a middle-school teacher in Amarillo, Texas, starting when she was 12.

“I knew that these memories were real,” Ms Griffin writes. “My body knew what had happened to me. The way I’d shake when I’d tell my story; the way my eyes welled up with tears at the mention of Texas.”

Ms. Griffin was paid nearly $1 million to write her story, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. The book was an instant sensation, receiving heartfelt endorsements from celebrities and influencers with huge social media followings.

Many of those supporters were Ms. Griffin’s friends, part of a rarefied world where billionaires and celebrities share private planes to remote getaways and display their friendships on Instagram.

Some were also involved with businesses, charities and political campaigns that receive financial backing from Ms. Griffin, who sits on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bumble, the parent company of the dating app.

“It’s an unbelievable book,” Gwyneth Paltrow said on the Goop podcast, introducing Ms. Griffin without revealing that the author was an investor in Ms. Paltrow’s business.

“I’m so deeply proud of her,” Ms. Paltrow continued, describing Ms. Griffin as “this beautiful, incredibly positive, brilliant woman.”

“The Tell” sold more than 100,000 copies, spent four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction this spring and attracted accolades from many readers. It also launched Ms. Griffin on a publicity tour befitting an Oscar winner.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, stories of sexual abuse are generally met with sympathy and support, not probing questions. “The Tell” also benefited from the publishing industry’s increasing reliance on books with the kind of celebrity connections that can pump sales. Many of these books are memoirs, which are rarely fact-checked.

But increasingly, readers have raised suspicions about “The Tell,” including in online reviews. Some have questioned the reliability of decades-old memories unearthed during drug-assisted therapy. Others have wondered how such abuse could take place in a public school without any adults picking up clues.

“This is a book that has been swallowed whole by the media industrial complex,” said Maureen Callahan, a sharp-tongued columnist, discussing the memoir on her podcast, “The Nerve.”

She added, “There is, on the other side of it, a guy who doesn’t have Amy Griffin’s money, power, resources.”

“The Tell” has been a topic of conversation from the Texas Panhandle to the beachfront estates of East Hampton to the well-financed labs of the pharmaceutical industry. In recent months The New York Times interviewed dozens of people from Amarillo, the publishing industry and the medical and MDMA communities, along with Texas authorities, and reviewed the book proposal Ms. Griffin used to pitch her project to publishing houses.

One classmate shared detailed accounts of being attacked — by a different teacher — in the very locations that Ms. Griffin wrote about, including at the same middle-school dance.

It may be impossible to know what happened between Ms. Griffin and her teacher in the late 1980s. In the book, Ms. Griffin herself acknowledges that she had no way to confirm her account: “There was no smoking gun, no physical evidence, no tangible proof. There had been no witnesses.”

Still, the book has had significant ramifications for those who were in Ms. Griffin’s childhood orbit.

It has also left many who live in Amarillo, a city of 200,000, feeling in some ways well observed but also reduced to caricature by an author who has not lived there for decades.

Following the outpouring of publicity, Amarillo law enforcement officials and victims rights advocates expected allegations from other students of Ms. Griffin’s teacher, who worked in the school district for 30 years. During his career as an educator, no one filed a complaint against him, state education and law enforcement officials said — nor has anyone done so since the book’s publication.

Ms. Griffin’s allegations hinge on her experiences in therapy with an illegal psychedelic that the Food and Drug Administration declined to approve for therapeutic use last year — a drug backed by a company that she and her husband have invested in through their foundation. Whether the drug actually helps patients recover accurate memories is a matter of debate.

Rick Doblin, the country’s leading advocate for the therapeutic use of MDMA, said he connected Ms. Griffin to her therapists. In an interview this summer, he said he read several drafts of the book and called it “important.”

But he played down the reliability of memories retrieved with MDMA, saying they are often “symbolic.”

“Whether it’s real or not — meaning whether the incident actually happened — from a therapeutic perspective, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “A lot of times people will develop stories that help them make sense of their life.”

He added, “In the therapeutic setting, what Amy went through, whether it’s true or not, it has value because the emotion is real.”

Mr. Doblin said both that “frightening memories that people have pushed out of their mind come back under MDMA” and “you have to be somewhat dubious, I guess, about recovered memories.” (The day before this article was published, Mr. Doblin contacted The Times and insisted that he did believe Ms. Griffin’s memories were real.)

Ms. Griffin describes the teacher she accuses of attacking her with enough specificity that some readers in Amarillo were able to discern his identity, even though she gave him a pseudonym. The Times was able to learn his identity as well: Ms. Griffin cited the teacher by name as her rapist in the book proposal sent to publishers, and she included details about a family tragedy he suffered. His name was also shared with people in Amarillo by her relatives after they learned of Ms. Griffin’s retrieved memories.

Over the course of more than three months, Ms. Griffin declined requests for an interview.

Penguin Random House, the publisher of “The Tell,” did not alert the teacher to the book or its accusations before publication because they believed his identity was sufficiently disguised, according to Thomas A. Clare, the author’s defamation lawyer. It is unclear whether local school officials were notified. A lawyer for Amarillo Independent School District declined to comment.

The teacher did not respond to letters left at and mailed to his house, or to email requests for comment. Some people who have worked at and attended the middle school say they are troubled by the specter of undetected child abuse. But others are alarmed that a teacher with an unblemished record has been deemed a rapist without a chance to defend himself. Since the book was published, locals say they have not seen the now-retired teacher around town.

Earlier this month, The Times sent Mr. Clare an 11-page list of questions and information likely to be included in this article, for fact-checking purposes.

Mr. Clare said that “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.”

‘The most honest thing’

After the book launch at the Ford Foundation, where the actress Mariska Hargitay moderated a discussion, Ms. Griffin hit the road.

She was interviewed by Sheryl Sandberg (in Menlo Park, Calif.), Hoda Kotb (New Canaan, Conn.), Ms. Witherspoon (Nashville), Ms. Paltrow (Summerland, Calif.), and Ms. Hager (Austin, Texas).

For Ms. Winfrey’s podcast, Ms. Griffin sat with the talk-show host before cameras and a rapt audience. On Martha Stewart’s podcast, she said she thought of MDMA therapy as “permission to go in and explore and be compassionate with myself.” On Drew Barrymore’s talk show, the women held hands while Ms. Griffin described her book as “by far the most honest thing I will ever do.”

Her appearances were boosted by her selection this spring as one of Time magazine’s “most influential” people of the year. “By opening her heart, she became a beacon for women everywhere,” Ms. Witherspoon wrote in an accompanying essay for the magazine.

In “The Tell,” Ms. Griffin paints a portrait of halcyon days growing up in Amarillo in the 1980s, with young girls riding banana-seat bikes to the candy store.

But in middle school, Ms. Griffin writes, her idyllic life took a horrifying turn — one she said she remembered more than three decades later with the help of MDMA, which she refers to as “the medicine.”

“The first thing I remembered was my head hitting the wall,” Ms. Griffin writes. And then, “I heard a clang! as his belt buckle hit the floor.”

She shares the locations where she said she was assaulted: the middle-school bathroom, the locker room, a classroom and under the bleachers. “He raped me there, too,” she writes.

The abuse is described as violent and brazen.

She writes that the teacher tied her hands behind her back with a bandanna and described “his penis in my mouth” and “his pubic hair on my face.” She says he beat her, dragged her on the bathroom floor, washed her mouth out with soap. On the night of the eighth-grade dance, Ms. Griffin says, he assaulted her in his classroom.

“If you tell anyone,” she says he told her at one point, “I’ll rip your teeth out.”

In the book, she writes that the final assault happened when she was 16. She was en route to a tennis match and ran into the teacher. Moments later, she found herself following him “numbly” into the team room at the tennis center.

In describing this incident, Ms. Griffin addresses a reader’s potential skepticism, as she does frequently in the book: “You’d assume that remembering this, I’d have thought, But wasn’t I sixteen then? I must have wondered, Why didn’t I stop him? I must have thought, How could he have done this in such a public place? Why didn’t I say no? I must have thought, Where were my boundaries?”

“But I didn’t think any of that,” she writes. “Held in the golden arms of the medicine, the compassion I felt for young Amy was absolute.”

A seemingly perfect life

Ms. Griffin grew up a scion of one of Amarillo’s most influential families, the Mitchells. When she was young, they owned about 50 Toot’n Totum convenience stores. Now they own 100, according to a lengthy article published this spring in Brick & Elm, an Amarillo lifestyle magazine.

After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1998, she worked in marketing for Sports Illustrated, a job she left several months before marrying John A. Griffin, whose former hedge fund, Blue Ridge Capital, managed about $9 billion at its peak. The couple has four children and live in an Upper East Side townhouse that they purchased in 2019 for $77 million. They also have homes in various locations, including the Bahamas and New Zealand.

Through a company she started in 2017, G9 Ventures, Ms. Griffin invests in companies founded by women. According to an email to The Times from her publicist, Ms. Griffin is “the start-up investor” behind companies including Goop.

In “The Tell,” Ms. Griffin writes that her adult life might have appeared charmed to outsiders, but she wasn’t always happy.

She recalls how she and her 10-year-old daughter had a door-slamming fight, with the girl questioning her mother’s need to appear perfect.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to have you as a mother?” she said, according to Ms. Griffin’s book.

“Perfect had always been my expectation for myself,” Ms. Griffin writes. “But hearing my daughter say it aloud bothered me, the way it always had when strangers told me I had the perfect life.”

She began to ponder what her need for perfection might be masking. Her husband’s interest in psychedelic-assisted therapy piqued her curiosity, and she decided to try it herself.

Before taking the MDMA pill, Ms. Griffin told the facilitator, “There’s something I can’t face. I know something happened to me, something I’m talking around. But I don’t know what it is.”

Five minutes into the session, she writes in the book, she sat up and said, “Why is he here?”

The facilitator asked, “Who?”

“Mr. Mason. From my middle school,” Ms. Griffin said. (Mr. Mason is the pseudonym she uses for the teacher in the book.)

In the book, Ms. Griffin describes two more MDMA experiences and subsequent psychotherapy sessions with a counselor who assured her that her violent memories were most likely real.

She writes that the counselor told her, “I have no reason to suspect that these are false or implanted memories.”

‘I can’t not write this book’

Ms. Griffin assembled a team of lawyers and private investigators to help her mount a case against the teacher.

One lawyer cautioned her about potential consequences. “‘You’re wealthier than your former teacher,” Ms. Griffin writes that the lawyer told her. “If you bring charges, there’s a chance he’ll come after you for defamation.’”

Still, another of her lawyers reached out to the district attorney’s office in Amarillo, prompting a phone call from a police detective, whom she refers to in the book as Sgt. Hank Jones.

Ms. Griffin writes that the lawyer advised her not to tell the police that her recollections of being attacked were retrieved through the use of illegal psychedelics. (Asked for comment, the lawyer did not respond.)

Over the course of a two-hour conversation, Ms. Griffin writes, she detailed her memories of abuse to Sergeant Jones.

“This is one of the most credible calls I’ve had in all my years of doing this,” the detective said, according to the book.

But before he could begin to investigate, Ms. Griffin writes, Sergeant Jones called her with devastating news. The incidents she reported from middle school fell outside of the statute of limitations. (In 2007, Texas eradicated its statute of limitations for most child sex crimes, but Ms. Griffin’s case could not be grandfathered in.)

“There would be no justice,” Ms. Griffin writes.

She considered bringing a civil case but ultimately chose not to do so.

She decided to write a book. Sam Lansky, a ghostwriter who contributed to Britney Spears’s memoir, “The Woman in Me,” was hired.

“As high-profile friends in my network have reminded me,” Ms. Griffin writes in her book proposal, “I am fortunate to have a life this rewarding and abundant, yet to have held on to my privacy and my anonymity. Why would I jeopardize that by inviting the attention that publishing this book would bring? And yet, I know that I must. I can’t not write this book.”

The classmate

Aside from Ms. Griffin and Mr. Mason, “Claudia” — a pseudonym for a middle- school classmate — is one of the most important characters in “The Tell.”

Throughout the book, Ms. Griffin describes harboring a suspicion that Claudia, too, had been victimized as a child by Mr. Mason, mostly because she long remembered seeing them together in a school hallway, with the teacher’s hand on Claudia’s shoulder.

In “The Tell,” Ms. Griffin recalls lending Claudia a dress for Cotillion, a dance unaffiliated with the school. This emerges as a central anecdote in the book. “The joy I felt to be able to offer Claudia that dress was boundless,” she writes.

She also writes that “in my memory, the dress and Claudia and Mr. Mason were all linked in some mysterious way I couldn’t explain.”

After Ms. Griffin’s MDMA experience, she writes, she felt an urgency to reconnect with Claudia.

According to the book, they met at a coffee shop. “I was abused by Mr. Mason beginning in the seventh grade,” she says she told Claudia. Ms. Griffin then asks if Mr. Mason had abused her too. Claudia says no.

Representatives for Ms. Griffin declined to share Claudia’s identity.

Relying on a middle-school yearbook class list, The Times interviewed many classmates of Ms. Griffin, including one who said she had experienced sexual abuse during middle school by a different teacher from the one Ms. Griffin writes about. That man left the Amarillo school district decades ago.

The classmate, who grew up in a group home for foster children in Amarillo, has clear memories that dovetail with central anecdotes in “The Tell.”

When contacted by a reporter, the woman wrote back that she remembered Ms. Griffin but was “unfamiliar with the book.” After she was mailed a copy of the memoir and read it, she said she was deeply unnerved. Some of the descriptions in “The Tell” of Ms. Griffin’s being assaulted are eerily similar to the abuse she herself endured, she said. She has since retained a lawyer.

The classmate agreed to speak to The Times on the condition of anonymity because she never had sought to make her private life public.

She said that she had been haunted by the abuse for decades and had confided in a few people close to her, including a daughter. Now an adult, the daughter told The Times that her mother described the assaults to her a dozen years ago.

Today, the lives of Ms. Griffin and her classmate are markedly different. This summer, while Ms. Griffin traveled to the Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, the classmate worked for $21 an hour as a home aide to an Alzheimer’s patient.

In middle school, Ms. Griffin and the classmate were not friends, but their lives intersected at school and at church. The classmate, who described a childhood of profound abuse and transience, said that as she strove for acceptance by the popular girls, Ms. Griffin, their leader, treated her with distant benevolence.

The classmate told The Times that she borrowed a dress from Ms. Griffin for Cotillion, but was ultimately unable to attend. Instead, she wore the borrowed dress to the school’s eighth-grade dance.

At this very dance, Ms. Griffin writes in the book, she herself was raped while wearing a borrowed dress.

“I was in Mr. Mason’s classroom,” Ms. Griffin writes. “It was early evening and still light outside. The frilly dress was pulled up over my head and I was bent over a desk while he was raping me from behind. I could feel the weight of the dress over my head, blotting out the light.”

In interviews, the classmate recounted a detailed story about her own experience at that dance. She said she left the dance floor with her abuser — a teacher who was not Mr. Mason — and went to a supply closet under the guise of looking for decorations. There, the teacher assaulted her and, in the process, soiled the dress she had borrowed from Ms. Griffin.

The classmate recalled the shame she felt when she and the teacher rejoined the crowd, her hair disheveled and what she described as the smell of sex clinging to her. She felt certain at the time that other students knew why she and the teacher left and returned together, but she said it was never explicitly discussed.

The classmate also said she recalled returning the dress at a church youth gathering at Ms. Griffin’s house, where she apologized profusely for the stain on the dress. (Ms. Griffin’s lawyer said her family never hosted a church group at their house.)

Mr. Clare, the lawyer for Ms. Griffin, said that the classmate interviewed by The Times was not the character referred to as Claudia in the book.

He added that The Times had been “duped by a fabulist” and threatened to sue, pointing to discrepancies between what Ms. Griffin wrote and what the classmate told The Times.

Among the discrepancies: The classmate told The Times that she had reconnected once in person with Ms. Griffin in recent years, and Ms. Griffin’s lawyer said she disputed this.

Mr. Clare also questioned the woman’s truthfulness in asserting that she was abused by a teacher in middle school: “Anyone who read the book could claim (falsely) to have” memories of abuse that align with what Ms. Griffin wrote, he said, calling the classmate “a liar.”

Merely telling a story of abuse, Mr. Clare continued, is “not proof or corroboration.”

‘Book publishers are not investigators’

In the “The Tell’s” pivotal section, Ms. Griffin describes receiving an unsigned postcard not long after her visit with Claudia that says in part, “I didn’t have it in me to tell you the truth.” She texts Claudia, who denies sending the postcard. The reader is left to wonder.

Mr. Clare agreed to show The Times the postcard described in the book. The black-and-white photo, taken in 1964 by Garry Winogrand, depicts children playing on a fence in the Bronx — an image incongruent with the message on the other side.

One detail of the message that is written on the card in traditional cursive does not match the one Ms. Griffin described in her memoir.

In “The Tell,” the author says that the postcard writer includes a quote ascribed to “Amy, circa 7th grade,” the year Ms. Griffin writes that the abuse began.

But on the postcard shared with The Times by Ms. Griffin’s lawyer, the quote is attributed to “Amy, circa 2nd grade.”

The Times also found notable omissions in the book.

Ms. Griffin writes that her husband was “funding research” into psychedelic-assisted therapy without describing the extent of their involvement. Mr. Griffin donated $1 million to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, known as MAPS. In addition, the couple, through their foundation, invested in Lykos Therapeutics (now known as Resilient Pharmaceuticals), a for-profit pharmaceutical company focused on MDMA, according to Mr. Doblin, the president of MAPS, which holds a stake of at least 15 percent in Resilient. Resilient — which is controlled in part by Antonio Gracias, a close friend of Elon Musk who has worked for the Department of Government Efficiency — is poised to sell MDMA should the F.D.A. approve it for therapeutic use.

Also, in her book proposal, Ms. Griffin writes that MDMA helped her remember another man she says sexually abused her when she was child.

She names the man, a well-to-do family friend, but does not include him or the claim of assault in the memoir. Reached by The Times, the man denied Ms. Griffin’s claim.

Though Ms. Griffin writes of her husband, “John was successful and respected in his career,” the scope of the family’s wealth is absent from the book. The influence of Ms. Griffin’s own family, the Mitchells, is also understated.

Like most memoirs, this one was vetted by lawyers but was not fact-checked by its publisher.

“Book publishers are not investigators,” said Whitney Frick, Ms. Griffin’s editor at the Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. “This is Amy’s story. We trust her, and all of our authors, that they are recounting their memories truthfully.”

A tidal wave of adulation

In March 2023, when Ms. Griffin circulated her 38-page book proposal, she called it “Believe Me.”

Like many proposals, Ms. Griffin’s was accompanied by a list of people who might help to promote the book upon publication.

Among the more than 90 names were celebrities (Amy Schumer, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts), media big shots (Anna Wintour, Savannah Guthrie, Katie Couric) and women whose companies Ms. Griffin has invested in (Becky Kennedy, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Sara Blakley).

Publishing houses were enticed, and Ms. Griffin sold the book to the Dial Press. (Ms. Griffin’s lawyer said that she has “given away all proceeds from the book.”)

One person who was not on the list was Gayle King, an anchor of “CBS Mornings” and Ms. Winfrey’s best friend. But an acquaintance of Ms. Griffin got a copy of “The Tell” to Ms. King. Ms. Winfrey said on television that Ms. King told her about the book and then she read it.

In October 2024, nearly five months before “The Tell” came out, Instagram accounts for Oprah Daily and Oprah’s Book Club promoted the memoir to a combined following of more than 4.3 million people.

This set off a tidal wave of adulation. Dozens of friends of Ms. Griffin who have large social media followings raved about the book on the same day, including Ms. Guthrie, Jessica Seinfeld and Charles Porch, the vice president of global partnerships for Instagram.

On March 11, her publication day, Ms. Griffin sent an email to her own network, encouraging friends to show their support for “The Tell.” She shared a five-page deck, promotional language and videos from Ms. Winfrey and a reader who was moved to tears.

Suddenly, social media was awash in superlative-laced posts featuring “The Tell.”

In person, conversations were more nuanced.

Just outside Amarillo this spring, more than a dozen people gathered at Burrowing Owl Books to discuss the memoir. The group talked for more than two hours.

“I’m reading and I’m like, ‘Get him,’” one man said. “Nail him right to the wall, right where he belongs.”

They acknowledged the pressure that Ms. Griffin probably felt growing up in a prominent family, and how upholding appearances might make it difficult to report abuse.

Two women said they had been students of the teacher; one had considered him a favorite, the other had not. A third woman said her son had found the teacher to be “ick.”

Toward the end of the evening, the careful conversation turned more skeptical.

One woman, who said she believed Ms. Griffin, still had questions. “If he brutalized her in those ways,” she said, “did she not have bruises? Did she not have hair missing?”

Then the group began to grapple with the fact that no one else has publicly accused Ms. Griffin’s teacher of sexual assault.

“The things that she described that he did to her,” one woman said. “You cannot picture him being just a one-time offender.”

“You’re not going to target the wealthiest person in Amarillo as your first victim,” another added.

The attendees were struggling. “She’s the only one saying this,” one woman said, “and it was under the influence of something.” But she quickly added, “I believe her. I do not doubt her story.”

Then someone posed the most challenging question of the night:

“Do we believe all women, or do we not?”

Across Amarillo, many said they believe Ms. Griffin’s account, because they admire her family and do not see what she had to gain by writing “The Tell.”

An advocate for assault survivors in Texas said that reporting sex crimes can be especially challenging in a patriarchal culture.

Hometown response

Some in Ms. Griffin’s hometown had anticipated a different response to “The Tell.”

At Family Support Services, an organization that helps survivors of domestic and sexual violence, a “soft interview room” had been set up to provide a place for adult survivors of any sexual violence in Amarillo to share their stories with law enforcement officers. The space was outfitted with comfortable chairs and state-of-the-art recording equipment, in part with money donated by Ms. Griffin.

Nearly six months after the book’s launch, the room had yet to be used for its intended purpose, according to Michelle Shields, the organization’s director of advocacy services.

Ms. Shields said that she knows it is difficult for some women to report abuse but that the organization expected that survivors inspired by Ms. Griffin’s book — and other victims of Ms. Griffin’s teacher — would come forward.

“I’m really surprised, to be honest,” Ms. Shields said.

Gordon Eatley was surprised too.

Sergeant Eatley is a detective in the Amarillo Police Department’s Special Victims Unit who specializes in child sex crimes. He appears in “The Tell” as “Sgt. Hank Jones,” the detective to whom Ms. Griffin reported her claims of abuse. She writes that he listened “intently, responding kindly.”

In an interview with The Times, Sergeant Eatley confirmed Ms. Griffin’s recollection of their conversations. He said he was eager to begin investigating her claims before realizing that the statute of limitations precluded prosecution.

“The story she gave, and the way she gave it, came across as very credible,” he said. “I was like, cool, this will be an interesting case to work. I’m really going to freaking test my chops.”

Until the book was published, he did not know she had taken MDMA.

“I was never told that it was a recovered memory,” Sergeant Eatley said. “I was just told she was finally willing to talk.”

Even if he had known, he said, and if there had been no statute of limitations, he would have tried to mount a case.

The involvement of illegal drugs, however, would have presented a significant impediment.

“How do you determine what memories are hallucinations and which ones are real?” Sergeant Eatley said. “The D.A. would have been like, ‘Bro, what’s this?’ And the defense attorney would have ate it for breakfast.”

Several years later, when he heard about the book, Sergeant Eatley anticipated a “firestorm” of survivors coming forward to report abuse by this teacher.

“I’m like, ‘Cool, I’m going to get a second bite of the apple,’” he said.

There would be no second bite.

Typically, Sergeant Eatley said, perpetrators of sex crimes against children abuse numerous victims. “They don’t stop.”

He added, “I’ve worked older cases before. You find other people.”

That Ms. Griffin’s memoir received enormous publicity and still did not yield additional claims against Mr. Mason is particularly confounding to Sergeant Eatley.

“There is nothing,” the detective said. “Zero.”

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.