Annie Altman v Sam Altman: how OpenAI’s boss gave evidence under oath over his sister's allegation that he sexually abused her

Artwork showing Sam Altman (l) and Annie Altman, with a photo of Annie as a child (r). Photos: Getty / Annie Altman

On 23 September this year, Sam Altman gave an address to the UN Security Council about the risks of AI as it accelerates. Unknown to the world, two days before, he had had another pressing appearance. In an unassuming conference room in San Francisco’s Mission district, he gave an eight-hour court deposition about an issue that he has long tried to shut down. He was responding, under oath, to allegations that for about 10 years in the late 90s and early 00s, he abused his sister Ann, known as Annie, who is nine years younger, sexually, physically and emotionally. The gravest of these accusations refers to sexual abuse that Annie claims started when she was three years old and continued until she was 12.

In the US, a deposition is similar to a witness giving testimony in court in front of a judge at a trial, but instead is videotaped as part of the pre-trial evidence that a judge will assess for a civil case. Depositions are often intense and ruthless, with the opposition’s lawyers asking demanding questions of the defendant for an entire day. 

The fact of this deposition has not been made public, until now. Until now, Sam Altman has successfully controlled the narrative about this case, about Annie Altman, and about what it could mean for OpenAI, one of the most important and influential companies on the planet.

Annie, who is 32, first went public on social media in 2021 with allegations of abuse, saying: “I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from [her brother] Jack Altman… I feel strongly that others have also been abused by these perpetrators. I’m seeking people to join me in pursuing legal justice, safety for others in the future, and group healing.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attends a United Nations security council meeting on artificial intelligence, New York, 23 September 2026. Photo: Selcuk Acar / Anadolu / Getty

She then found herself largely ignored. The media has barely covered the story, while her family have strongly denied the claims. In a statement in January 2025 after Annie filed a lawsuit she had battled to bring to court for years, they described the allegations as “deeply hurtful and entirely untrue” and Annie as “a family member who faces mental health challenges”, and listed many ways in which they had offered her support in the past. Despite this, in August this year, a judge in St Louis, Missouri, decided there was enough substance to them to give a civil case against Sam Altman the go-ahead. Sam’s legal team fought hard to get the lawsuit dismissed. They also tried, but failed, to get the case thrown out before the deposition took place.

This lawsuit, like many complex historical child sexual abuse cases, has faced many challenges, including parting ways with one set of lawyers over difficulties gaining concessions relating to Annie’s serious long-term health issues, which include post-traumatic stress disorder. In the latest twist, last week, on 20 October, the judge, Zachary Bluestone, dismissed Annie’s case against Sam. His dismissal memorandum stated: “Over the past six months, Plaintiff Ann Altman has refused to appear for an independent medical examination (“IME”) despite accommodations and multiple opportunities to do so, ignored other discovery obligations, caused delays that required modifications to the case-management order, and failed to meaningfully prosecute her case.”

In other words, the judge’s decision to dismiss is not a ruling on the substance of her claims, but is related to practical difficulties regarding giving evidence that Annie had fought to solve – the primary one being that she could not fly to Boston for a court-ordered second medical examination which would have assessed her mental health for evidentiary purposes. 

The judge also cited Annie’s failure to meet deadlines to hand over documentary evidence in the dismissal order. Annie’s lawyer, Santos Perez, then filed an affidavit with the court setting out Annie’s compliance with discovery deadlines.

Annie has multiple long-term serious health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She says she was not well enough to fly, due to symptoms of Ehlers-Danlos syndromes (a group of inherited conditions that affect the body’s connective tissue) and recent orthopaedic surgery, and had a doctor’s note explaining that she was unable “to ambulate” – a medical term meaning she was unable to walk independently. Annie had also offered to cover the costs of flying Sam’s lawyers to a location closer to her hometown in order to fulfil the medical examination requirement. She also offered to do the assessment via video conference.

Bluestone, who is a relatively recent Trump appointee and member of the conservative legal Federalist Society, dismissed the case via a court order, pending a more comprehensive account of the administrative issues that led to the dismissal, most likely next month.   

Perez, the lawyer who represented Annie on much of the civil case and has advised her on her options for appeal, says the dismissal is over “a technicality”. He added: “I absolutely believe in Annie.”

The dismissal memo also tossed out Sam’s counterclaim, which argued that Annie’s allegations of abuse were defamatory. Sam has also claimed that Annie’s legal action against him amounts to “extortion”. 

This isn’t the only legal case Annie has been fighting against Sam and her other relatives in recent years. She also successfully sued the family over money left by the Altman siblings’ late father, Jerry Altman, that the family withheld from her for several years.  

Why and how the siblings arrived at this point is the subject of this Nerve investigation, which includes extensive interviews with Annie carried out over recent weeks, with people who know Annie well, and with her lawyers. It explores how one of the richest and most powerful men in the world (OpenAI is worth approximately $852bn according to a March 2026 funding round) came to find himself facing these most serious of accusations – and the struggle Annie has faced to be heard.

Sam Altman and OpenAI

Artwork from the New Yorker’s profile of Sam Altman, April 2026. Credit: New Yorker

Sam Altman, who is married and has a young child, lives with his husband, Oliver Mulherin, in California. He has long been a controversial figure, not least because he is one of a handful of men in charge of the AI companies that are rapidly and irrevocably altering the world and our lives. In April this year, the New Yorker published a profile of him by journalists Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz with a headline that posed a highly pertinent question: "Sam Altman May Control Our Future – Can He Be Trusted?". Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, a former vice-president of research at OpenAI, is quoted as saying: “The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself”. 

Now 41, Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside fellow billionaire Elon Musk (and others), proposing that its research into AGI – artificial general intelligence – should be shared openly and its work would be “not for profit”. By 2019, Altman had reneged on the not-for-profit agreement, and in 2022 the company launched ChatGPT, the first large language model-based AI chatbot.

In 2023, with Musk long gone (he left in 2018 and has since tried and failed to sue Altman for going back on the not-for-profit promise), serious questions about Altman’s personality and behaviour began to emerge. In November of that year, Altman’s board members stunned the industry when they ousted him from his position as OpenAI CEO. 

In a statement on 18 November 2023, the board said that it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” citing "a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities".

The New Yorker article quotes OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever (who left the company in 2024) saying that he didn’t think “Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button… any person working to build this civilisation-altering technology bears a heavy burden and is taking on unprecedented responsibility”. 

The article goes on to report that Sutskever compiled pages of Slack messages, internal testimonies and HR notes during this time at the company. One memo alleged that Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of… lying.” An anonymous OpenAI board member told Farrow and Marantz: "He’s unconstrained by truth. He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone." 

Five days after he was fired, Altman mounted a counter-coup, rallying the support of employees and a crucial backer – Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. He successfully demanded the resignation of board members and was reinstated as CEO. It was a spectacular reversal in which he has cemented his position at OpenAI and revealed how completely he dominates the company.

2026 has been similarly turbulent for OpenAI. In September, the company admitted that their AI agents had hacked into multiple US government websites. According to OpenAI, “models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure… systems’”. In the same month, Altman announced a rumoured stock-market listing would not be going ahead (it was an  "ill-advised moment" to attempt such a thing, he said), and the company cancelled the launch of its hotly anticipated ChatGPT6. Earlier this month, the company disclosed that its software had hacked an Australian government department in June 2026.

These corporate struggles are public and endlessly documented across global media outlets. OpenAI has been at the centre of the busiest AI news cycle of recent times – a global story about the future of this emergent technology – yet there has been vanishingly little coverage of the allegations of abuse brought to court by his sister which led to him being deposed.

The allegations

It’s worth noting that it is unusual for a historical childhood sexual abuse case to get to the stage of deposing a defendant, and that the case has survived the hurdles at which similar cases have stumbled and been thrown out. A recent US report by the National Institute of Justice – which focused on criminal rather than civil claims  – stated that “child sexual abuse cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute. Medical evidence is available in less than 5% of the reported cases… and the prosecution often must rely on the testimony of a child… Our research finds that a small proportion of the reported cases (less than one in five) went forward to prosecution.”

While the above research relates to criminal prosecution rather than civil proceedings, the evidentiary issues – the lack of medical evidence, the reliance on the testimony of the child – in civil claims like Annie’s also face other hurdles. Civil claims involving childhood sexual abuse often have very short statutes of limitations. In some states, the child must bring the case within one year of turning 18.

Annie’s home state, Missouri, recently passed new laws to allow for extensions of time for child sexual abuse victims in order to recognise the difficulties with bringing these cases within such strict time limits. The law – section 537.046 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri – allows a claim to be brought within 10 years of the claimant turning 21, which meant Annie had until her 31st birthday to file her claim (she filed in January 2025, at the age of 30).

They also note that “caregiver support of the child was an important predictor of the case moving forward”. (Annie’s case has progressed despite her mother, Connie Gibstine, denying her story.)

Another significant aspect of this story is how little coverage the allegations have had in the media, given Sam's profile and influence over the future of global technology. The tech press have largely ignored it. For the New Yorker’s long read, Farrow and Marantz spoke at length to Sam over multiple interviews as well as to more than 100 current and former employees of OpenAI. Farrow also spoke at length with Annie (the Nerve has seen evidence of this). But in the 20,000-word article, Annie's allegations are referred to in a single paragraph, in which, the writers state, they “could not substantiate” Annie’s allegations (in the US, the pre-publication process in journalism is different to the UK; substantiation can be treated as more important than the law). Farrow explained to Annie in a text message seen by the Nerve that this was because the New Yorker piece was a “more business-oriented Sam story”. 

In response to questions from the Nerve about these editorial decisions, a New Yorker spokesperson said: “Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz's investigation into Sam Altman surfaced serious allegations regarding dishonesty in Altman’s business practices.

“The piece was meticulously reported, edited, and fact-checked. All of the claims Farrow and Marantz assessed in the course of their reporting were held to the New Yorker’s strict standards of corroboration. Ms Altman's allegation was treated with the utmost seriousness and placed in responsible context. We stand by our reporting."

Reporters at Bloomberg similarly left the majority of Annie’s story out of one of its reports, despite, according to evidence the Nerve has seen, the reporter speaking to Annie at length about her allegations and flying a camera crew to her home to record her discussing them for a podcast. When the podcast was released, the abuse allegations were absent. Annie is seeking to take action against Bloomberg to get the piece corrected.

One journalist has given these allegations proper consideration: the US tech reporter and author Karen Hao, who wrote about them in her definitive 2025 book Empire of AI (Penguin). The book offers a detailed account of both OpenAI and Sam and dedicates an entire chapter to Annie and the allegations. Hao also recounts pressure from OpenAI’s communications head, Hannah Wong, to leave Annie out of her story.

“For six months, Wong’s team had said they were committed to arranging an office visit with me as well as interviews with key OpenAI leadership and employees as I repeatedly sought to engage them and hear their perspective,” Hao writes. “Five months in, they began to sour on the idea.” Recounting her first – and last – meeting with Wong, Hao says Wong pointed out that  “some journalism programmes had even discussed whether it had been ethical for [reporter Elizabeth] Weil to include Annie in her [New York magazine] profile” and Wong saying that “maybe this, too, was something I should consider”.

The reference to Elizabeth Weil in this quote relates to a profile in New York magazine for which Weil interviewed Annie extensively. It was the first and, to date, only major publication that has painted a detailed picture of Annie’s existence as a member of the Altman family. 

During an onstage interview with Nerve co-founder and journalist Carole Cadwalladr in May this year, Hao said that the manner in which “Sam Altman and OpenAI have sought to silence Annie is very telling of the way that OpenAI seeks to silence critics in general”.

“They seek to silence any critics by just chipping at their legitimacy,” Hao said. “By whispering into a politician’s ear, by whispering to a journalist that they’re playing access games with. They’re able to speak quite softly, but with an enormous amount of influence. They do the same game with trying to get Annie to stop spreading her story.” 

After her meeting with Wong, Hao did not gain any further access to Sam Altman or OpenAI employees. But she included the story of Annie’s background and allegations in her book. She also covered Annie’s claims that the family withheld monies left to her by her father, Jerry, who died in 2018. 

Construction of a $16 billion data centre developed for Oracle and OpenAI in rural Michigan. Many residents of this rural community opposed the project, worried about the loss of farm land and the project's impact on the availability and cost of water and electricity. Photo: Getty

The financial lawsuit 

In their 2025 joint statement refuting Annie’s claims, the family said: “We have given her monthly financial support, directly paid her bills, covered her rent… and have offered to buy her a house through a trust. Via our late father’s financial estate, Annie receives monthly financial support, which we expect will continue for the rest of her life. Despite this, she continues to demand money from us." 

This was partly true. But what was not mentioned in the family statement was that they had cut off financial help in 2020, that financial help offered sometimes came with conditions – and that Annie had started receiving payments from her father’s trust in 2024 after she had begun the process of hiring lawyers to take legal action. 

Allegations of financial abuse were the subject of a separate civil lawsuit Annie brought against her remaining family members, first filed in June 2025. Annie, born in 1994, is the youngest child of a large and affluent Jewish family: father Jerry, mother Connie Gibstine and three older brothers – Jack, born in 1989 or 1990 (there are no publicly available records confirming which year is accurate) Max, born in 1987 and Sam, born in 1985. Jerry, the son of a shoe manufacturer, was a real estate and property developer and once-divorced by the time he met Gibstine. Connie, who had degrees in both medicine and law by the time she met Jerry, had a long career as a doctor. Jerry and Connie had been separated for many years by the time of his death, but remained living in the same household.

Jerry was a prominent figure in the lives of all the Altman siblings, but Annie was particularly close to him. Sam told Hao that one of the biggest lessons he learned from his father was that “you always help people – even if you don’t think you have time, you figure it out”.

Jerry left the entirety of his assets and his estate to his family, to be split equally between Connie and his four children under a trust structure. The amount of the trust is not public but it operates under the common mechanism by which the appointed trustee gives out distributions to the named beneficiaries when they deem it appropriate.

Annie’s financial lawsuit claimed these monies were legally hers and were being withheld by the family. 

From late 2019 to mid-2020, Annie made several appeals to her family for financial help, including once the pandemic added another layer of stress and uncertainty, according to Hao’s reporting. After Sam and her mother attended two family therapy sessions with her, they agreed to cover her expenses for a part of the year. In May 2020, Annie requested further financial help for therapy bills, but the family declined, according to Hao. The family has claimed that it has relied on professional financial advice when making decisions about how and whether to support Annie financially. In Empire of AI, Hao writes that in 2019 Annie “learned that her dad had left her his 401(k)”.

 A 401(k) is a form of US retirement savings plan – in Jerry’s case, it amounted to $40,000. “But,” Hao reports, “soon after, her mother, who retained authority over her father’s retirement funds as the surviving spouse, notified Annie that she would not in fact be receiving the money.” 

Connie had been separated from Jerry for years before his death, Annie told the Nerve, but they never formally divorced – meaning she could override his 401(k) wishes due to her “surviving spouse” status. 

“The best ‘tax strategy’, Gibstine wrote to Annie in an email, was for Gibstine to keep the funds in her name in a tax-deferred account that would pass to Annie via a trust and to which she would ‘gain access at age fifty-nine and a half’,” Hao reported. 

This meant that, in the immediate term, Annie would not have access to the $40,000 retirement plan – a pot of money that was left solely in Annie’s name. 

According to Hao, In explaining her decision to withhold this sum, Connie wrote to Annie that “we all want what is best for you, and we believe that what is best for you (and for everyone) is financial independence, which brings long-term satisfaction, personal growth and security…  For this reason, we want to clarify that we will not financially support you if/when your current inheritance from Dad runs out.” 

According to the lawsuit, Connie misled Annie about the existence of the trust: “The trustee repeatedly told Annie no trust existed and did not provide her with a copy of the trust.”  In 2019, a representative of Connie told Annie via email that “this trust would only come to exist upon the trustee’s death”. At that time, the trustee was Connie Gibstine.

But on 20 January this year, Judge Nicole S Zellweger said that this wasn’t true. She ruled in Annie’s favour on the question of the trust being payable to Annie before Connie’s death. 

Annie’s story

Courtesy of Annie Altman

My reporting of Annie’s story began when I reached out to her in April to see if she would consider speaking to me. I explained that I had extensive experience in trauma-informed investigative journalism, including a book I wrote about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. 

We have spoken regularly for this piece and during this time, like many of the people I have spoken to who know her, she has struck me as someone who, while dealing with long-term symptoms of PTSD, is nevertheless stable and rational. The extensive research I have undertaken – speaking with Annie, her lawyers, mentors, teachers, many friends, mental health experts, trauma experts as well as reviewing hundreds of pages of documents – leads me to believe that there is an alternative picture of Annie’s mental health than the one painted by the family.

When Sam was born in 1985, the family lived in Chicago. Four years later, they moved to Jerry’s hometown of Clayton, Missouri. Both Sam and Annie attended the prestigious John Burroughs School, a private school in Ladue, Missouri, that one of its former teachers describes as “extremely academically demanding”. 

In her deposition under oath Annie testifies that she endured a horrendous childhood involving not only physical and sexual abuse, including vaginal and anal rape, forced oral sex and forced sexual touching, but also coercive controlling behaviour which began when she was a small child and only ended when Sam left home. The rest of the family – Connie, Sam, Jack and Max – deny all of the allegations. Annie has released the first hour of her deposition on social media and is fighting to have the full eight hours unsealed and released to the public.

According to her testimony and interviews with the Nerve, as a child Annie suffered such severe anxiety that she had regular panic attacks and used to sneak to the bathroom on the second floor of her home and have a bath in the middle of the night to try and calm herself down. “I also ground my teeth so badly that a dentist described my molars as being ‘flattened down like an ice rink’," she says. At another dentist’s appointment, “a dental hygienist recognised that I was so panicked by having anything forced into my mouth that she stopped the appointment and told me I could leave.” 

Annie says she remembers being given Zoloft (sertraline) when she was around 12-13 years old. Zoloft is a heavy-duty SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) used to treat panic disorders, major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in adults. The Nerve has seen medical records of 100mg of Zoloft being prescribed to Annie at age 14 after two weeks on 25mg and two weeks on 50mg.

Dr Michael Milobsky, a US board-certified pediatrician who also operates a child mental health clinic in Colorado and is active on social media as an expert on child mental health, told me that he uses Zoloft frequently and considers it an effective treatment. However, he says that “responsible prescribing practice with Zoloft is starting at much lower doses and carefully titrating to effect while observing for negative reactions or side effects. 

“Psychotropic medications are unpredictable and can cause a paradoxical neurophysiological reaction where you can become hopelessly depressed.”

Courtesy of Annie Altman

Zoloft can be prescribed by mental health practitioners for teenagers, but it is licensed only as a first-line intervention for those under 17 who have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The medical record seen by the Nerve which first prescribed Annie Zoloft does not mention a diagnosis of OCD; it refers only to “anxiety disorder”. 

Guidelines published by the FDA dated 2021 state that “Sertraline… is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) indicated for the treatment of Major depressive disorder (MDD) in adults [and] Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in adults and pediatric patients 6 years and older”. It also states that “safety and effectiveness in pediatric patients other than those with OCD (6 to 17 years) have not been established”.

2021 FDA guidelines on the prescription of sertraline (Zoloft) to children.

Records from a mental health specialist who treated Annie in 2015 note that Annie expressed concern that she had been on Zoloft for “years” and that it “has been continually prescribed through her pediatrician with no follow-up or recent evaluation for effectiveness”.

From infancy and through toddlerhood, Annie was also treated by her paediatrician for recurring urinary issues. Medical studies show that there can be benign explanations for these infections in young girls, but current medical guidance in the UK instructs practitioners to consider the possibility of sexual abuse whenever a child presents in this way.

Milobsky confirms that recurring urinary issues in toddlers will mean that the possibility of sexual abuse “will always be on the list”. “From there, the index of suspicion is based on your relationship with the family, how they’re presenting, how things evolve over time, the sense you get of the family system,” he says.

Annie says she was repeatedly prescribed antibiotics for these infections without any safeguarding interventions about their possible cause. These prescriptions, Annie says, were sometimes written by her mother, who was a doctor, and who, according to Annie’s sworn testimony, she had already told about the abuse.

In 2015, aged 21 and studying biopsychology at Tufts University, Annie began working with a therapist to treat her ongoing panic attacks, and to gradually phase out her Zoloft use. (SSRIs can sometimes cause debilitating withdrawal symptoms, especially for those with a long stretch on the medication.) A note at the time by the same therapist makes the following observations about Annie:

“Insight: good 

Judgement: good.”

“This was the first time I felt like I’d made a meaningful choice about anything,” Annie told the Nerve. “In my whole life I had never asked myself what I actually wanted, because it was never safe for me to even consider that question. Whenever I had tried to ask that question, it was blocked, or it had been unsafe for me to ask that question.

“I was a child,” she continues. “And I had learned that if I made everybody else happy, maybe I would be safe. The only muscle I had ever practised was ‘what does everyone else want from me?’. I didn’t understand I was allowed to have my own needs or wants. I thought I was only valuable if I was taking care of others.

“I also felt like I had to be perfect in order to earn love. I thought, maybe I’ll be loved if I do this perfectly. Or at least I won’t be harmed again.”

The path to recovery was far from easy. After tapering off Zoloft and being treated by a mental health professional for the first time, Annie describes how she began processing the abuse she suffered using conventional talk therapy strategies. 

Processing traumatic memories is incredibly taxing, both psychologically and financially. Reliving her traumatic memories with her therapist caused emotional distress and exacerbated  physical difficulties that had started in childhood and remain with her to this day.

As a child, Annie had begun experiencing digestive problems – she remembers vomiting frequently – which led to a diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome while she was in high school. These symptoms worsened as she got older, going on to include severe abdominal pain, and in 2020 she was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome. The same year, she was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndromes. In 2013, she began experiencing intense ankle pain, which led to orthopaedic surgery years later, resulting in mobility difficulties which mean that she uses a walking boot.

Annie says her decision to see a mental health specialist and begin to taper off Zoloft also led to her questioning her decision to meet family expectations that she attend medical school. She had, by this time, secured prestigious research jobs in laboratories in San Francisco.

In 2017, Annie quit her research job at the University of San Francisco and trained to be a yoga teacher. “I just decided: no thank you, not any more. I wanted to do something just because I wanted to do it,” she says. “I decided to dive into yoga and prioritise my health. I finally said ‘enough’.” Annie did not want to start yoga teacher training unless she had a job to come back to when she finished her course. She also got a job at a local company that delivers organic fruits and vegetables directly from farms to consumers.

However, her physical symptoms and emotional struggles worsened, compounded by increasingly difficult financial circumstances and, she says, by the fact that her family cut off financial support in May 2020. She left her job because she was too physically unwell to work and became unable to pay the rent on her flat in the San Francisco Bay area. By 2021, she was forced to live out of her car and ultimately, out of desperation, turned to online sex work and escort work in order to pay for stable housing. Karen Hao reports that Sam says he contributed to her rent for some of this period.

“I never, ever imagined that I’d end up homeless or forced into sex work,” she tells me. “It was my absolute Plan Z; I did what I needed to do to survive. I never imagined myself this physically disabled – I never saw any of this as something that could happen in my life.”

Some psychologists believe there is a link between sexual abuse in childhood and sex work in adulthood. According to Dr Jessica Taylor FRSA – a chartered psychologist with a PhD in forensic psychology and an internationally recognised expert on victimology, trauma, and forensic psychology – “many victims of sexual abuse later enter sex work or prostitution, for a wide range of complex reasons. Research has repeatedly identified high levels of previous sexual abuse and exploitation among people involved in sex work.”

Annie now lives in Hawaii, is no longer involved in sex work, and says she “would tell anyone to never do it if they can avoid it”. She says she stopped sex work when her legal challenges to the family’s dealings with Jerry’s finances led to the family agreeing to pay her a monthly stipend. 

A question of memory 

In the New Yorker profile, the paragraph in which the reporters state that they “could not substantiate” Annie’s allegations says: “In interviews that the journalist Karen Hao conducted for her book Empire of AI, Annie suggested that memories of abuse were recovered during flashbacks in adulthood.” This references the commonly held notion that child abuse memories are “retrieved” from scratch in adulthood. 

But Annie says she has clear memories of the abuse well before adulthood, and claims that she told her mother about the abuse when it was happening. (Connie denies that any abuse occurred.)

It was in 2019, when she undertook trauma therapy aged 24, that Annie started talking about abuse with medical professionals and those close to her. The Nerve has seen her medical records from this time, in which the medical history section notes “[history] of child sexual abuse”.

Another medical document says that Annie reported “vague memories of inappropriate childhood sexual contact and these memories are corroborated by significant other [memories]”.

This indicates that Annie already had “significant” memories of sexual abuse before she underwent any process of therapeutic memory retrieval, according to her medical notes.

In 2021, Annie underwent EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) treatment, which has been proven to help access details of memories that may have been repressed. Contrary to suggestions that this involves retrieving full “new” memories of which the patient had no knowledge before suddenly appearing, the patient brings the memories they do have to therapy, and these treatments help the brain recover the full extent of them, some of which are fragmented because they were not properly processed. The NHS, World Health Organization and the American Psychological Association all recognise EMDR as an effective treatment for trauma and related conditions. Research studies consistently show that the treatment can lead to significant and lasting reductions in distress for a wide range of issues. 

I have spoken to two of Annie’s ex-boyfriends for this piece. One, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, was with Annie at the time of her EMDR treatment. This boyfriend says Annie was open with him about the fact that her therapy was focused on sexual abuse from her brother. He says that despite the horrific memories she was processing in therapy, the strongest memories of that time – when they were living together during a Covid lockdown – were joyful moments with Annie sitting in the living room, playing her ukulele and singing. Their relationship ended, but the two are still close friends. “I’d do anything for Annie,” he says.

Neily, a former boss, has known Annie for 10 years and describes her to me in similar ways as others that I spoke to. They alll made comments consistent to the effect that she is intelligent, diligent, generous, kind, and has both curiosity and integrity. Neily says she will always support Annie and believes her allegations.

“I adore Annie,” Neily tells me. “She worked so hard and was incredibly sweet, but I could tell there was trauma. I could tell something had happened to her. I have been through a traumatic experience and when you’ve been through that, you can recognise it in others.”

During the weeks in which we have been speaking, Annie has been continuing with her appointments for the physical and psychological problems she lives with. The family cite “mental health struggles” in a way that implies that this undermines her testimony, but Annie is very open about the symptoms of PTSD that she says result from childhood abuse.

It would be highly unlikely for a person with the level of childhood trauma Annie claims to have endured not to have mental-health-related symptoms in adulthood. But this would not necessarily mean that they would lack the control or the ability to tell the truth. The Annie I’ve come to know through interviews with her and many of the people in her life differs markedly from the picture of her painted by Sam and the rest of the family.

I spoke to more than a dozen of Annie’s friends, lawyers – including her current and former attorneys Laura Politi and Henry Elster, Michael Graz and Santos Perez – as well as colleagues and other reporters who have spoken to her, and they all paint a picture of someone who is bright, forthright and articulate. 

To the layperson, indeed, the way Annie presents may sometimes seem quirky. She posts videos of herself singing, playing her ukulele and doing yoga, while also posting about the fact that the breakdown of her physical health led to her turning to sex work. In the clip of her deposition, posted on social media, Annie can be seen rhythmically tapping her shoulders and wrists while answering some questions, and knitting while answering others. To some, this could point to the negative aspects of the family’s stated “mental health struggles”. But these kinds of behaviour are consistent with someone who suffers from PTSD, has learned to treat and regulate it, and is open about it. 

Experts call this kind of behaviour emotional freedom techniques, or EFT. According to Nick Ortner, an EFT researcher and author of The Tapping Solution, these treatment techniques involve “tapping on meridian endpoints [which] deactivates the amygdala's alarm, signals physical safety, reprograms the hippocampus, and clears negative emotional patterns behind stress and trauma”. According to clinical psychologist Dr Claire Plumbly, such behaviour regulates the nervous system, particularly for trauma patients: “Research has shown that people who engage in crafts such as knitting and crochet can experience greater relaxation and a reduction in stress and ruminative thoughts. The rhythmical bilateral movements of knitting, for example, are similar to those used by therapists in EMDR to help with reprocessing trauma.” 

At the time of publishing, Annie’s abuse case has been dismissed over disclosure issues with her legal team exploring an appeal. But the fact remains it had passed the point at which the judge considered there to be a case to answer, with both parties being compelled to submit to depositions and the process of discovery, and with Annie required to submit to an independent medical examination. 

While no journalist can know the truth of the matter – that is for courts and the individuals involved -  it is notable that such serious allegations have been sidelined by media outlets. Sam Altman is one of a small group of AI power brokers shaping the future of our world. It has been demonstrated that he exercises complete control over OpenAI, a company that has billions of dollars riding on it with its planned IPO. It is important that such people are fully scrutinised, and it is strongly in the public interest for Annie Altman to be heard, and her fight for justice put on the record.

Sam Altman (l) and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attend a state dinner hosted by Donald Trump for Chinese president Xi Jinping, 24 September 2026. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP

To return to Ilya Sutskever, the former OpenAI co-founder quoted in Hao’s book: he said that, when he first heard about Annie’s accusations, “[he] didn’t know whether her allegations were true, but he believed that whatever had happened, Annie had had a rough experience growing up with Sam. It was evidence of how long Sam’s history of problematic behaviours could have extended. Annie’s word, abuse, was also the word Sutskever felt best captured his own observations of Altman.”

Sam Altman, Jack Altman, Max Altman and Connie Gibstine were all approached for comment but did not respond. The reporter who interviewed Annie for Bloomberg also did not respond to a request for comment.

This article was updated on 30 October 2026 to clarify the month in which Annie Altman gave her deposition - it was August 2026, not September as previously stated - and to clarify a point about the potential appeal following dismissal. We also clarified that the medical examination in Boston was the second medical exam ordered by the court.