Even Kathy Griffin's Mom Disapproved of Controversial Donald Trump Photo: 'You’ve Gone Too Far'
Even Kathy Griffin's mom hated the photo of Griffin holding Donald Trump's severed head.'She said, [...]
Even Kathy Griffin's mom hated the photo of Griffin holding Donald Trump's severed head.
"She said, 'I am not with you on this one, Kathy. You've gone too far,' " Griffin told The Hollywood Reporter of her 97-year-old mother's comments about the photo.
Griffin said practically no one was supportive of her attempt to stay in the spotlight. Family members, famous friends, Trump supporters and even government agencies like the Secret Service and FBI came at her hard.
"It's been really hard," said Griffin's boyfriend, Randy Bick, adding that his own brother, a former Marine, unfriended him on Facebook after the incident. "It seems like everybody turned."
Despite the almost unanimous reaction from her loved ones, Griffin said she wasn't convinced of her wrongdoing until longtime friend Rosie O'Donnell reportedly asked, "What if Daniel Pearl's parents saw this?" referring to the Wall Street Journal reporter who'd been publicly decapitated by Pakistani terrorists in 2001.
Griffin said her thought process for the photo wasn't unheard of.
"When you're in between gigs and trying to stay on the map, you have to think of ways to stay in the spotlight," Griffin said, adding that another shot she and photographer Tyler Shields brainstormed was her in a bikini by a pool doing her "best Kim Kardashian," but then they began pitching ideas of images that "would f— with Trump," and collaborated on a decapitation theme.
Though the photo did drum up publicity, it also got Griffin's entire tour scrapped.
"I don't blame the theater owners. These are theaters that are normally playing 'Mamma Mia!' or 'Stomp,' and all of a sudden they're getting calls saying they're going to 'shoot her in the c— live onstage.' That was the most common threat," Griffin said. "And that they were going to 'cut my head off and stuff it up my c—.' "
The FBI got involved, determining that Griffin was under "credible threat" and offered her a tutorial on how to deal with the hate mail.
"There's a pile that we think is harmless," she explained of the system. "And a pile that's questionable. And then there's a pile that the FBI says you put in a Ziploc bag and give to them. That's my life now."
While her relationship with the FBI remains amicable, Griffin isn't too keen on the Secret Service, which was required to investigate whether she was a threat to POTUS.
One of the Secret Service investigators asked her if she kept any weapons in her home.
"I said, 'No. Oh, well, I have a sword. It's huge,' " she recalled. "And my lawyers looked at me like, 'What are you doing?' The agents got very interested and were like, 'What is it for?' And I was like, 'It's not for anything. I got it when I hosted the Gay Porn Awards.' And I have to say, the guy smirked. He was like, 'Tell me more about the sword.' I was like, 'Well, it's big. You know the gays.' And then it was like, 'No more sword-asking questions.' "
Griffin also blames her meteoric decline in popularity on Andy Cohen, her former boss who took her spot on CNN's New Year's Eve coverage after the network let her go following the Trump effigy. Griffin even posted a 17-minute Facebook diatribe against Cohen, accusing him of offering her drugs backstage at his Bravo talk show, and blasted TMZ chief Harvey Levin and CNN boss Jeff Zucker as well.
She told THR she regrets nothing — especially the cocaine story about Cohen. She says she shared it "to illustrate a double standard. If it was me [offering drugs backstage], somebody at Bravo would have said, 'You have to go.' When you're a woman, you get one fuckup, and it's over. When you're a guy, you get chance after chance after chance."
Griffin still maintains that she doesn't deserve the swift backlash that came her way after offering up an image of an assassinated president of the United States.
"I didn't commit a crime. I didn't rape anybody. I didn't assault anybody. I didn't get a DUI. I mean, my God, there are celebrities that f—ing kill people," Griffin lamented of her alleged blacklisting from the industry. "The minute I do something that makes money, they will all love me again. When I'm dead, I'll be a legend. But not now."
Photo credit: Instagram / @kathygriffin
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