Kathy Griffin, rumored to be a comedienne, gave a press conference Friday morning alongside her attorney Lisa Bloom to address the controversy she began when she posed for a shocking photo with a mockup of President Trump’s bloodied head. The well-deserved backlash, even from her friends and colleagues on the left, has been so intense that she issued a perfunctory apology video and began losing gigs. Now she is going on the offensive, claiming victim status and lawyering up with Bloom, who just happens to be the daughter of feminist ambulance-chaser Gloria Allred.
Griffin began by saying that her “apology absolutely stands. I feel horrible,” then went on to explain that she does edgy political humor and loves to make people laugh, before claiming that the President and his family are targeting her to ruin her life, according to Variety.
“What’s happening to me has never happened, ever, in the history of this great country,” Griffin said, “which is that a sitting president of the United States, and his grown children, and the First Lady, are personally, I feel, personally trying to ruin my life forever. Forever.”
Griffin then went on to make jokes about Trump’s hair (“his nest”) before saying, “I am teasing the President because this is America, and you shouldn’t have to die for it.” She then went on to say she is getting death threats, then to make more jokes about Trump’s hair, then to plead for sympathy because Trump is bullying her, although neither she nor Bloom explained how the Trumps have targeted her apart from issuing public statements expressing their distaste about the photo.
“I don’t think I will have a career after this,” Griffin said, tearing up.
What a tragedy that would be for comedy.
“I am not afraid of Donald Trump. He’s a bully,” she said. She said that “it was quite clear to me” that Trump and his family “are trying to use me as a distraction.”
Variety notes that Bloom said Griffin’s criminal attorney Dmitry Gorin called it “outrageous” that a comic should be subject to a criminal investigation by the Secret Service.
“I have had everyone turn on me, but I just want to make people laugh,” Griffin said.
How could she possibly have thought that her photo would make anyone laugh? The answer is, she knew it wasn’t funny but she did know that it would be outrageous and she is an attention whore. But “I didn’t think people would threaten to murder me or mobilize people to murder me.”
Death threats are never acceptable, but the central fact here is that Griffin’s photo itself was graphically threatening to the President of the United States. Had a conservative comedian done the same thing during the Obama presidency, that comedian would be in the Witness Protection Program now.
At the press conference, Bloom, who laughed uncontrollably like a talk show sidekick at every one of Griffin’s inappropriate jokes, attacked Trump for all sorts of reasons irrelevant to her client’s issue: his supposed misogyny, his budget cuts, his pullout from the Paris climate accord, and attacks on Planned Parenthood. She claimed that Griffin’s “joke” fell well within protected speech, calling the photo shoot a “parody” of Trump’s “own sexist remarks.” Really? In what way was Griffin’s photo a parody of sexism?
“The message was clear: Criticize the president, lose your job,” Bloom said.
Are Griffin and her publicity-seeking attorney insane? This isn’t about criticizing the president – this is about Griffin seeking attention, getting it in spades, and then backtracking and playing the victim to turn her into a symbol of courageous #Resistance to Trump.
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