Copyright Slate
“Are you recording?” Kathy Griffin has stopped midsentence, mid–Malibu house tour, to ask me if my recorder is on yet. Most people want to know if they’re getting caught on tape, especially if they’re a famous person who has welcomed a journalist into their house. Griffin has been an actor and stand-up comedian for almost 40 years, and is intimately aware of the power of celebrity gossip. But in this case, she wants to know if I’ve turned on my recorder not because she’s worried about getting caught on a hot mic, but because she wants me to catch every incendiary word. “I walk all around the neighborhood every day and I say hello to all the celebrities,” she tells me, her four dogs in tow. Her block is especially celebrity-filled, and if you ask Griffin, they all fucking hate her. “It’s everyone from Larry Ellison—who I’m not speaking to—to Marc Andreessen, who can suck my dick. Elon better hope he doesn’t run into me. He stays at Larry’s when he visits. Sergey Brin, not speaking to him,” she says, walking me along the perimeter of her pool. “Oh, and I’m not speaking to Gary Busey. I can’t trust him. He’s too crazy! He runs over people! He whips his penis out!” Griffin’s career is now split into two eras: one before she held a dummy of the president’s head covered in fake blood, and one after. Frankly, in both, celebrities were avoiding her, but for slightly different reasons. Before 2017, Griffin was a stand-up best known for gossipy stories about Hollywood types, told by a woman with no shame and a charming thirst for fame herself. But after 2017, she became that comedian who posed with a bloody, severed Donald Trump head. The photo was part of a session with photographer Tyler Shields, a reference to Trump’s 2015 statements about Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her wherever.” For Griffin, the response was swift and immediate, with plenty of MAGA supporters and detractors alike criticizing her for allegedly stoking violence against the president. She lost almost every job she had, including as co-host of the CNN New Year’s Eve special, and as spokesperson for Squatty Potty. Many of her personal friendships, including with people like Anderson Cooper and Cher, never recovered. Her income stalled, her shows got canceled, and she couldn’t even get booked as a presenter on some lousy award show. But the impact went beyond the professional. Griffin was also investigated by the Secret Service, placed on a no-fly list for two months, and harassed online and in person for years by rabid Trump supporters. “I am the patron saint of people that are canceled,” Griffin says. “Everyone from Rudy Giuliani’s lesbian daughter to Bette Midler calling me, going, ‘Trump just tweeted about me and the Secret Service called. What do I do?’ And I’m like, OK, let me get out the handbook.” Also on her call log lately? Jimmy Kimmel, a longtime friend who similarly called Griffin up after ABC suspended his show for incorrectly characterizing Charlie Kirk’s assassin as one of “the MAGA gang.” While Griffin was mostly abandoned by other creatives and some in her own audience, other comedians closed ranks around Kimmel. Even his own audience responded by canceling their Disney+ subscriptions en masse. After “thoughtful” conversations with Disney, the show was brought back. Griffin is glad Kimmel has returned to his desk, but she’s certainly aware of the clear discrepancy between his proto-cancellation and hers. “I mean, I couldn’t get booked on anything to promote this special,” she says. “Sherri Shepherd was the only talk show that would have me.” (Griffin showed up to the show last week wearing, of course, a bikini.) The almost two-hour-long special she’s talking about—Kathy Griffin: My Life on the PTSD List—was self-released last month on YouTube. (She also hosts a weekly YouTube chat series called Talk Your Head Off.) Now, she’s kicking off a 31-stop tour featuring all new material, some about her personal life, some about her federal investigation, and some of the celebrity gossip that made her famous to begin with. Eight years since the Trump photo shoot—freshly 65 and free of cancer, two ex-husbands, and an opioid addiction—Griffin is returning to life as a touring comedian. “What I’m hearing most is, I just need to laugh,” she says. “Everything is so dark and hopeless.” But hanging over her comedy forever is not just her stunt from 2017, but now, a second Trump term that puts Griffin’s government-encouraged censorship in sharp relief. Back in 2017, the Trump administration’s response to the photo seemed reactionary and harsh. With hindsight, it’s clear that it was a precursor to a much more brutal media environment for anyone seeking to criticize the powers in charge. Online, snippets of Griffin’s old stand-up specials periodically go viral for their accuracy in predicting the future. She took shots at Ryan Seacrest’s flimsy male ego; he was later accused of sexual harassment. (Seacrest repeatedly denied the claims.) She derided Ellen DeGeneres’ brand of judgmental kindness; her show was later canceled over toxic-workplace allegations. (Griffin still shit-talks DeGeneres today with seeming glee.) She dismissed Justin Timberlake’s celebrity; he has faced a late-stage reckoning over his relationship with Britney Spears and infamous performance with Janet Jackson, before pleading out in a 2024 DWI case. (Even now, she has issues with his white-boy blaccent.) Ever since she built a career on telling the truth about powerful media figures, Griffin has had to play the long game in being proven right. “I do get a kick out of when young people go on TikTok occasionally, and they’ll find a clip from my old specials,” she says, “and they’ll say, ‘Kathy called it.’ ” With Trump not even a year into his second term, she’s again finding bitter vindication. “I was kind of ahead of my time,” she says, tilting her head down, big blue eyes peering through a thicket of false lashes. “Pun intended.” Griffin, unlike almost any other famous person in Malibu, wants you to see every corner of her 8,200-square-foot house. She greets me with a wide-open mouth and her iPad held aloft; for the entirety of our three-hour conversation, she’s bidding on items from Joan Rivers’ personal collection through a live remote auction. “Do you think I need these shoes?” she asks me about a pair of well-worn Prada pumps starting at $800. In a crisp white button-up tucked into gray yoga pants and white sneakers monogrammed with her full name, Griffin walks briskly over to the fridge. “Would you believe this shit?” she asks, motioning to tidy rows of pricey diet sodas. She passes through her dining room, where she frequently hosts salons and dinners, and then past the cabinet that houses her new dishes: They’re pink and gold, gifted to her by the singer Sia, who grew tired of Griffin’s mismatched dishware. “I love when people come over and say, ‘What does your husband do?’ ” she says about the property, purchased for $8.8 million in 2020 and now worth around $15 million. Griffin has been slowly renovating her space ever since her January divorce from her second husband, Randy Bick. “My shrink said, ‘Make the house more you,’ ” Griffin says, walking by glass cabinets displaying all her handbags and opening up several closet doors full of coral and blush dresses. “So these are all the gowns I’ve lost awards in.” I lose Griffin in her house, but am quickly reoriented by the forceful rattle in her voice. Barely 5-foot-3, Griffin still looks like she always has: alabaster complexion, slightly downturned pink lips, small hands that make quick mischief. Her voice has largely recovered from the lobectomy that inadvertently paralyzed her vocal cords in 2023, and now I can hear her yell for me to “get in here!” In her glam room, she’s clipping in more vibrant red hair extensions than she already has. “I’m like the Kardashians with money—it’s not enough,” she says, looking in a mirror. “This business is cutthroat. Wake up, Mary. You think you can just go without a toupée? Are you nuts?” In every room of Griffin’s house is some delight for the pop-culture-obsessed. In her powder room is a halfway decent portrait of her painted by Erik Menendez in 2010, and a pretty rude 1996 letter from Jerry Seinfeld. In her closet are several 2-foot-tall crowns given to her after she judged various drag queen contests. On her desk are stacks of books; she says she reads three books a week, including my own recent memoir, and she repeats details of my life back to me through our conversation. She shows me a signed copy of The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier, who used to be one of Griffin’s dinner guests. “I would go, ‘Sidney, don’t bring your Medal of Freedom. Just come to dinner. Just dress nice and don’t embarrass me.’ ” Even her assistant comes with trivia. “His last boss was named Ellen DeGeneres,” Griffin says, “so I’m a walk in the park.” He reappears hours later to remind Griffin about her Pilates class. “Tell them I’m not coming. I’m having too much fun,” she says in the middle of calling The Apprentice creator Mark Burnett “the devil.” It makes sense that Griffin is at the nexus of so much meaningful cultural ephemera—she’s been working in the industry for a long time. In the early ’90s, she started with the Groundlings and as a stand-up comic, before appearing as a guest star in shows like Seinfeld and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. In 1996, she became a regular on Suddenly Susan opposite Brooke Shields. (In 2004, Griffin released Allegedly, one of her many stand-up specials offering unfiltered celebrity gossip, where she talked at length about Shields’ 2001 wedding and her alcoholic mother.) By the mid-aughts, Griffin had made enough of a name for herself as a cameo queen and red-carpet fixture that Bravo gave her a reality show for it. My Life on the D-List ran from 2005 to 2010, not only showing Griffin as she worked the Grammys red carpet or prepared for a stand-up show at Carnegie Hall, but also the ugly underbelly of her life, like getting fired from the E! red carpet and the end of her first marriage. “The first husband stole money from me,” Griffin claims. (That husband, Matthew Moline, denied Griffin’s allegations.) “The last divorce took me out. On the floor, crying in the fetal position. Nonverbal. Worse than cancer.” Indeed, since her 2017 photo shoot, Griffin has had a rough go. She got lung cancer despite having never smoked, the surgery for which took her voice away, quite literally. (In her latest YouTube special, you can still hear how damaged her voice was just a few months ago.) In 2020, her mother and D-List fixture, Maggie, died after many years with dementia. After a 2020 suicide attempt, Griffin got clean from a prescription pill addiction. In 2023, she publicly alleged that her brother was a pedophile. Much of this appears in her latest work, and it’s all a lot funnier than it sounds on paper. “I’ve always talked about whatever was going on in my life,” she says. “I’m a magnet for crazy.” But in the basement, in her unused wine cellar (Griffin doesn’t drink), is a reminder of all the work Griffin did that no one wants anymore, in large part because of that Trump photo shoot. “I bought back my entire library, all my specials, My Life on the D-List, and then no one wanted to buy it,” she says. “I spent all that money buying my own shit back from NBC Universal, it cost me a fortune, and now it’s in my wine room.” She says she released her special on YouTube in part because she was sick of getting network notes. “I had a Zoom call and there were all white, middle-aged guys, as usual. They were still telling me to cut the show down to an hour and only have the heavy, serious parts. I was like, ‘You haven’t even seen the show!’ ” she says. “I kept saying, ‘Don’t you have any girls I could talk to? Put a girl on this call.’ ” But the other issue is that she just couldn’t find anyone who would buy her work, at least not since the beheading photo that changed her life. “I begged on my hands and knees like a dog,” she says. “Nobody would even come to the show. Not one buyer. Not Netflix, not Hulu. The people are buying tickets.” In 2019, she self-financed her documentary, Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a Story, which premiered at SXSW. She ended up releasing it on video on demand. The project cost her $1 million. She self-financed this latest special too, which has cost her around $100,000. “It’s a money-losing proposition,” she says. “I just couldn’t bring myself to ask my people to pay 10 bucks and have to sign up for yet another thing. I’m not going to make a dime. I don’t care. I just didn’t want the material to die on the vine.” Griffin’s cancellation has cost her tangibly—she says she’s spent between $3 million and $5 million on legal fees alone since 2017. “That’s a lot of shows,” she says. Her security fees also total in the millions, and she says she’s been harassed and stalked by Trump supporters ever since 2017. “These people are crazy and violent. They’ve come to my house. They’ve found the real estate videos of the inside of my house,” she says. “I recently did an interview with Reuters and it went wide, and I had to get security again.” Griffin at least had a little extra help in 2017 after the photo went viral; her neighbors were Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. “They had so much security that I actually felt safer,” she says. “They were so sweet. Well, not Kanye. You can’t talk to him. He’s crazy.” Meanwhile, her work opportunities have never recovered as the heads of most networks get cozier and cozier with Trump. She still struggles to get booked on television, and you’ll probably never watch her do a shot live with Anderson Cooper in Times Square again. But don’t worry, she’s still rich: “I think it’s weird that women still don’t say their salaries. I have $50 million now. I’m very proud of that.” Since her divorce, she’s settled her debts, and sold her house in Bel-Air for $14 million. She only flies private. “Here’s your headline: You’ll never see me on TV again,” Griffin says. “I’ve now come out against basically every network and streamer because there’s now a true monopoly. Now there’s five old white guys who decide everything we consume. These guys don’t die. They don’t retire. They keep coming back like Whack-a-Mole, and they all remember me.” Griffin knows that the head stunt will outlive almost any other work she does. “I have a real body of work,” she says, “but Jane Fonda told me that’s what’s going to be on my headstone.” As Trump’s second term makes his first look like child’s play, it has given Griffin a new perspective on the photo, too. “There are some days when I really take pride in the picture,” she says. “Well, I shouldn’t say that. I’m proud of the picture every day. Now.” “Joan used to yell at me for doing stand-up in flats,” Griffin says, scrolling through more of Rivers’ shoe collection on auction. For most of her career, Griffin has been compared to her mentor Joan Rivers. It’s always been an apt comparison: Rivers too told gossipy stories about plastic surgery, celebrity scandals, ex-husbands, and self-loathing. She was frothy and funny and mean. In her time, she was also blacklisted by late-night shows and criticized for a lack of political correctness. But she was also friendly with the man who eventually became president and has since tried to shackle free speech. “People ask me so much about Joan; would she be canceled now, and how would she have handled the Donald?” she says, calling Trump what Rivers always called him back when he was just an obnoxious real estate developer in New York. “She would have figured out a way to thread the needle. She was so smart.” What Griffin and Rivers both understood about Trump was that while he was a credible threat worth taking seriously, he was still a ludicrous one worth laughing at. But it’s hard to be funny lately. There are fewer and fewer punch lines in our increasingly bleak world, but it’s also hard to crack a joke without incurring the wrath of some governing authority with thin skin. Griffin was an early example of political interference in art and culture; lately, we hear it more and more, from Kimmel’s suspension to The Late Show’s cancellation by CBS to university students getting detained by the Department of Homeland Security for writing op-eds critical of Israel. Griffin was just the canary in the coal mine. “I’ve been in the game so long. I’ve made Obama jokes, I’ve made Clinton jokes. I’ve made fun of every president. I’ve never even heard of a comedy environment where you can’t make fun of—talk about punching up—the highest seat in the land!” she says. “And so it is shocking to me that this stuff is just unfolding day in and day out and the majority of us are walking around like la-la-la-la, with our fingers in our ears.” What the Trump investigation offered Griffin is a clear awareness of the risks, and a total lack of fear. Her newest YouTube special addresses the photo and Trump, as does the fresh material she’s taking on tour. There appears to be no adjustment to any of her work just because of a little federal investigation once upon a time. “I don’t care anymore. They almost can’t do anything worse,” she says. “And I’m willing to go to prison. I’m going to be 65! I’m not going to leave the country! I love my home, my life, my friends, my silly dinner parties and lunch parties. I live for that.” Not that she isn’t prepared for those risks. These days, she has four law firms working for her—all conservative ones. “I don’t want a fellow, as they would say, libtard, like myself,” she says. “No, I want the Trumper lawyer who secretly actually doesn’t like what happened to me, even if he likes Trump.” After a full house tour, Griffin sits down in front of an iPad and iPhone—with the Rivers auction still running on a third device, don’t forget—to do simultaneous Instagram and Facebook live broadcasts, a way to promote her upcoming tour dates. She’s talking as she has all day: at an incessant clip, like a machine gun, whether a viewer asks a question or not. “I’m not a fan of Rick Caruso,” she says, referring to the billionaire real estate developer who ran for L.A. mayor in 2022. “He’s a Trumper type of guy, and I just want to be clear about that. So I guess I am a political comedian after all,” she adds, before immediately pivoting to her tour, kicking off in early November. “So! I’m going to San Jose, Toronto, Ottawa, Burlington, Concord. I have been protested and prepare to be protested again. Someone said they just did a photo shoot inspired by me. Oh my goodness, I hope there was a head involved. As a metaphor!” Only for a few moments over the course of the day does Griffin stop speaking. She is an unrelenting chatterbox during our interview, in conversations with her assistant, over text with Melissa Rivers as she bids on her mother’s items. But when she indeed wins, for $10,000, the Joan Rivers item she had her eye on all day—the Chanel handbag that Rivers took everywhere, that she took to dinner with Griffin herself—she’s (briefly) quiet. “I know I overpaid, technically.” After she finishes her broadcasts, and after several hours at her house, Griffin looks at me matter-of-factly. “I’m going to go eat an Impossible Burger,” she says, which is my hint to bounce. But before I leave, Griffin offers me her number should I have any follow-up questions. She types it into my phone and waves me goodbye, standing next to her Grammy and Emmy awards, which are, of course, right next to the front door for maximum visibility. In her driveway, I scroll through my phone and find her name in my contacts, along with the title she gave herself. “Kathy Griffin: Famous.” As if any of us could ever forget.
