Kathy Griffin to Attend White House Correspondents Dinner Despite Trump Controversy

Comedian Kathy Griffin will be at the White House Correspondents Dinner next month, despite last year's controversy over her "severed" President Donald Trump head photo.

Honored that I'll be attending the White House Correspondents Dinner for the first time this year. I'll be the guest of the great team at the @WashBlade @losangelesblade!

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) March 23, 2018

"Honored that I'll be attending the White House Correspondents Dinner for the first time this year," Griffin wrote on Twitter. She said she will be a guest of the Washington Blade and Los Angeles Blade, two LGBT news outlets.

This will be the latest attempt by Griffin to resuscitate her career after she was shunned by both sides of the political aisle for a photo shoot showing her holding up a "severed" and bloody Trump head. While on Real Time with Bill Maher, she announced a comeback tour, including a show at New York's Carnegie Hall.

"I'm dipping my toes into touring again even though the Trumps and nobody wants me to work again," Griffin told Maher. "I just booked today, I'm going to do a show at Carnegie Hall in New York and I'm also going to go right to Trump's backyard and do a show at the Kennedy Center."

Griffin started the comeback attempt with a cover interview for The Hollywood Reporter.

"When you're in between gigs and trying to stay on the map, you have to think of ways to stay in the spotlight," she said of the ill-conceived photo.

The scandal began in May 2017, when the photo taken by Tyler Shields surfaced online and instantly sparked a backlash. Griffin was denounced by media figures on the left and right, and CNN dropped her from her long-running New Year's Eve gig with Anderson Cooper. Griffin later issued an apology, but she retracted it in a press conference with attorney Lisa Bloom. Still, the Secret Service launched an investigation. Since she could not get work in Hollywood, she did a tour of New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Europe in October.

The comeback tour hit a speed bump in October when Griffin resurfaced with a long diatribe about Andy Cohen replacing her on CNN's New Year's Eve show. She claimed in the video that Cohen offered her cocaine backstage at her Bravo show. She stood by that claim, which she said highlighted the double standard in TV.

"When you're a guy, you get chance after chance after chance," Griffin said.

The Daily Show contributor Michelle Wolf will host the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 28 in Washington.