Kathy Griffin wishes she had Dave Chappelle’s Teflon coating.
The “My Life on the D-List” comic is speaking out again about being canceled for more than five years after a photo of her holding a bloodied, severed head of then-President Donald Trump went viral in 2017.
“The hatred from the right was more intense than I could have thought, but not that surprising. But the left wing being so taken by this campaign against me was hard. It was just too much for me,” Griffin said in a Newsweek interview published Thursday.
The 62-year-old lost friends in the photo aftermath, including Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen. Then, she said, she got to see other comics do what she thought were similarly offensive things without losing out the way she did.
“When I see Dave Chappelle making fun of cancel culture and saying, ‘If this is what being canceled is like, I love it.’ I think: ‘Dave, you weren’t canceled, honey. You’re fine,’” she told Newsweek. “You got in a little trouble for four seconds for comments on a comedy special that some people regarded as promoting bigotry toward transgender people. The Netflix boys backed you up, like everybody knew they would.”
And she didn’t confine her criticism to Chappelle.
“It’s frustrating for me because Chappelle, Joe Rogan, Kanye West and Elon Musk; none of them have ever been canceled or erased, they need to calm down. Do they need clarity on what this looks like when it’s real? It’s five-and-a-half years of lost income. It’s $2 million in legal fees. Those dudes, they all b— about it, but they have no clue.”
Griffin also talked a bit more about her overdose on prescription Xanax and Vicodin, a June 2020 suicide attempt that she first revealed in August 2021.
“I got my living revocable trust in order. I had all my ducks in a row. I wrote the note, the whole thing. And I just thought, ‘I’ll just take a bunch of pills, and I will just go to sleep,’” she said at the time on “Nightline.”
On Thursday, she told Newsweek, “I then overdosed on June 25, 2020, and went to the hospital on one of those psychiatric holds. My joke about it is that now I have more in common with Britney Spears and Kanye West than I ever wanted to.
“But I got the help I needed,” she added. “And now I go to AA, even though I’m a pill girl.”
———
