After baiting celebrities for years, the standup nearly lost her career over her ‘Trump head’ photo. Here, she explains why she’s sorry about saying sorry

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“KATHY GRIFFIN BEHEADS PRESIDENT TRUMP”. So shrieked the headline to a story posted on scurrilous gossip site TMZ on 30 May of this year. Griffin, best known for a standup act in which she acts as a showbusiness tattletale recounting mortifying run-ins with more famous celebrities backstage (her most famous targets include Cher, Josh Groban, Ryan Seacrest and Céline Dion), was pictured brandishing a blood-spattered Donald Trump mask looking like a recruiter for a Beverly Hills branch of Isis.

Fallout from the photograph was swift. The 45th president tweeted his displeasure (“Kathy Griffin should be ashamed of herself … Sick!”) and noted that his son Barron was having a hard time dealing with the image. The First Lady added that someone who would pose for such a photograph must be mentally ill.

Griffin explains that the offending snap was taken in about 20 minutes at the end of day-long photoshoot. “I took a picture that you or any one of your friends could make,” she explains. “I put it online and was under federal investigation for conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States of America. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s insane and I truly believe if it happened to me it could happen to you.”

Her professional standing was dealt a number of blows. She was speedily axed from her regular job of co-presenting CNN’s New Year’s Eve show with long-time friend Anderson Cooper. An upcoming live tour was cancelled due to death threats. The Secret Service opened an investigation into Griffin’s motives in posing for such an inflammatory picture. The flame-haired comic was assailed by outraged tweets from political and showbusiness luminaries affiliated with both sides of the ideological divide. “I was vilified by everyone,” says Griffin in her characteristic manic rasp. “I was vilified by Chelsea fucking Clinton. I was vilified by my friend Don Cheadle. I was vilified by people I’d had at my fucking home. Nobody had my back. It happened so fast. I didn’t see it coming.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Top Trump ... Griffin’s head shot elicits a furious response from the Potus. Photograph: Twitter

That it happened to Kathy Griffin at all is ironic. Prior to the Trump decapitation, the most controversial moment in her career was her 2007 Emmy acceptance speech for her reality sitcom, My Life on the D-List, when she reacted to the previous procession of celebrities dedicating their awards to their buddy, Jesus, with a jubilant “No one had less to do with this award than Jesus. Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now.”

While Griffin is politically engaged on a personal level – “I’m a resister. I still go to every march in the world”– politics is not what built the $10.5m Los Angeles home that is situated next door to Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s residence. If the name Kathy Griffin was notable in any way to the pop culture consumers of the 1990s, it was either because of a small role in Eminem’s The Real Slim Shady video or a slightly larger one as Brooke Shields’s inappropriate, loudmouth sidekick in the unfondly recalled sitcom Suddenly Susan.

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At the same time Griffin was honing her standup persona (Sandra Bernhard and Garfield leafing through The National Enquirer) at comedy clubs, including the Groundlings theatre where, in 1992, she started Hot Cup of Talk with fellow comics Margaret Cho and Janeane Garofalo. Her set evolved to include bits where she would play video clips capturing the likes of Julia Roberts and Mariah Carey at their most deluded and least relatable (“I love Mariah Carey. Remember the breakdown? I love the breakdown”). She comments: “Hollywood is like high school: the celebrities I make fun of are pretty much the mean cheerleaders in school.”

Griffin may share a following and a similarly pugnacious delivery with her friend and mentor Joan Rivers, but Rivers spent much of her stage life dispensing advice on ensnaring men, while Griffin treats straight males with a mixture of disinterest and disbelief. (“Are you a gay man?” she asks me at one point. When I own up to identifying as a straight man, she utters a revolted, “Ugghh. Who’s the publisher of this fucking fishwrap? What are you doing giving me a fucking straight for this interview?”) Mocking celebrity obliviousness propelled Griffin into the mainstream. In 2005, her cable show My Life on the D-List catalogued the daily indignities of being on the periphery of fame, while also dealing with the dissolution of her marriage, the death of her father, and displaying the occasional fragility of her self-esteem.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Not so PC ... Griffin holds a press conference about her controversial photograph. Photograph: Mark Ralston/Getty

American comedy in 2017 is synonymous with being loudly anti-Trump. Saturday Night Live’s ratings have never been higher. Bill Maher and John Oliver both just saw their Trump-excoriating current affairs comedy shows renewed until 2020. Late night is filled with highly rated left-wing Trump bashers such as Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah and Seth Meyers. I go through this list with Griffin to illustrate all the people more likely than her to have detonated such a far-reaching explosion. I bring up the name of Stephen Colbert, who started the year with TV experts predicting the day and date of his likely dismissal and is going to end it crowned King Of Late Night. “Fuck Stephen Colbert!” she bellows. “He has the whole power of CBS behind him. Bill Maher frickin’ dropped the n-word and then was back at work four days later with full support of HBO. I was on the no-fly zone for fuck’s sake!”

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Returning to a woe-is-me theme she knows that I know is partly material she’s getting in shape for her act and partly genuine indignation, she thunders on. “I’m not a CNN employee. I work there for one night when [network head] Jeff Zucker says, ‘I’m going to pay you a hundredth of what I pay Anderson Cooper and I’m going to limit your jokes so even though you have to co-write the whole four and half hours, you can only have three Trump jokes’,” she says. “This is the head of a global news organisation censoring a comedian on the very night he’s hired that comedian to be as outrageous as possible with their very stoic tentpole star with steely blue eyes.”

Griffin’s reference is to now former friend Anderson Cooper, who denounced her Trump picture. I suggest that Cooper wanted to be seen as being titillated by her comedy while still maintaining a detachment. “That’s the story of my life, honey,” she drawls. “They want to suck the comedy out of me and then they want to detach.”

Griffin doesn’t even pause for breath when asked why, among the plethora of comics trading in potentially treasonous material, she was the one to take the fall. “Fifty-six-year-old female,” she says bluntly. “I will not be convinced this was not a straight-up case of sexism and ageism. I really think Trump went for me because I was an easy target.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sister act ... Griffin with Joan Rivers. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty

Recently, Hillary Clinton spoke about the dichotomy between Griffin’s treatment and hers during the presidential race. “We recently had this big kerfuffle – this condemnation of Kathy Griffin – for the picture she had of herself holding a head of Trump like a play on Perseus holding the head of Medusa,” she said on the With Her podcast. “They were selling T-shirts and mugs at the Republican [National] Convention with Trump holding my head. Nobody said a word. Not a word!”

On 3 June, Griffin, shaken by the onslaught of disapproval, held a press conference during which she apologised for the picture and mumbled, “I don’t think I will have a career after this.” She has subsequently announced a world tour – “I have to go to Reykjavik to get a laugh!” – whose official poster features her holding a globe in the same way she posed when clutching the Trump head. So, is that apology still applicable?

“All my comedian friends were mad that I apologised at all, but having performed in two war zones, I thought this is a narrow apology because the thing people think was depicted I understand,” she says. “Rosie O’Donnell, the pre-eminent expert on being terrorised by Donald Trump, said, ‘What if Daniel Pearl’s [US journalist who was beheaded by terrorists] mother sees the photo?’ So I totally get it. But in light of everything Trump and the administration have done since, I 100% withdraw my apology.”

Griffin says that it was hypocritical that she was singled out, considering all the things Trump has been responsible for. “I will openly accuse the President of the United States of human rights violations,” she adds. “You know, my whole life and career has been championing the rights of women, gay folk and disenfranchised folk. This administration is a fucking nightmare for us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The best of Times Square ... Griffin with CNN anchor and former New Year’s Eve show co-host Anderson Cooper. Photograph: Alamy

Beyond the death threats, beyond the damage to her reputation, beyond the irreparable damage done to cherished personal relationships, one consequence of that fateful photo session wounds Griffin most deeply. “I was the face of Squatty Potty,” she wails, referring to her endorsement of a popular US toilet stool designed to enhance bowel posture. “Squatty Potty is an organisation run by two married gay guys who hired me for a commercial which they wrote that said, “Kathy Griffin Is Full of Shit.” They put me on the front page of their website and it said, “Kathy Griffin, Queen of Poop.” And then those two gay guys go on Fox News and they say, ‘Kathy Griffin ruined our business!’”

Griffin cackles at the loss of her Squatty Potty millions but then turns sombre. She mentions other celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg and Bill Maher who have taken a vocal anti-Trump stance. “This will not follow them the rest of their careers,” she says. “I’m the only one who had to do the perp walk. I’m going to have to figure my way out of this and I’m going to have to do it one joke at a time.”

Kathy Griffin plays Vicar Street, Dublin, Wednesday 8 November; London Palladium, Friday 10 November; Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, Saturday 11 November

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