There’s a moment midway through Kathy Griffin’s new “docu-comedy” A Hell of a Story when the comedian brings up a tweet from her one-time friend Anderson Cooper.
“For the record, I am appalled by the photo shoot Kathy Griffin took part in,” the CNN anchor wrote on the same day her infamous Trump photo hit the internet. “It is clearly disgusting and completely inappropriate.”
“Here’s the deal,” Griffin tells her audience. “I don’t have a punchline for this one. It just hurt and it just sucked and that’s all there is to it.”
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When I ask Griffin during this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast whether, more than two years later, there has been any reconciliation between her and the man with whom she spent many long nights co-hosting CNN’s live New Year’s Eve coverage, she shakes her head and says no. “I was just in love with Anderson,” she adds wistfully.
The day after Cooper’s tweet, CNN announced that it was removing her as a co-host from that annual special. The network ultimately replaced her with Watch What Happens Live! host Andy Cohen, who appears in Griffin’s new film via a TMZ clip in which he jokingly pretends not to know who she is.
“I call those incidents unnecessary roughness,” she says of Cohen’s seemingly casual cruelty. “Like, I’m down, honey, you don’t need to kick me.”
But the man she really blames for effectively destroying her career as she knew it is CNN president Jeff Zucker.
As Griffin explains, she and Zucker have a “long history,” dating back to the ‘90s when he was president of NBC’s entertainment division and she was on the sitcom Suddenly Susan. “He personally cast me and that was a gigantic break that changed my life,” she says.
Later, Griffin worked with Zucker again on her reality show My Life on the D-List for Bravo. “I remember one year he wouldn’t give me a raise and so I called him personally and I put my mom on the phone,” she says. “And I had my mom negotiate a raise. And he was laughing and kept going, ‘You’re not really doing this.’ And I was going, ‘Oh no, she’s in a mumu and she has a box of wine so don’t mess with her because you have met your match.’”
They had such a good relationship at one point that Zucker even hired Griffin to roast him at an event where he was receiving an award. But as soon as President Trump tweeted that she should be “ashamed of herself” for posing with his mock-severed head, Zucker kicked her to the curb.
“I guess the part that sort of stuns me to this day is, number one, that photo, whether you like it or not, was absolutely beyond within the parameters of the First Amendment,” Griffin says. “So people that think I broke the law are misinformed. Jeff knows that.”
“And I know this is going to sound silly, but I kind of think Jeff owes me an apology,” she continues. “Seriously, I didn’t do anything wrong.”
When I suggest that CNN was already “feeling the heat” from the new Trump administration in the spring of 2017, Griffin says, “Jeff acts like a tough guy and he’s a pussy. Like, he’s really a pussy.”
As another example, she brings up what happened the last time she co-hosted CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage the month after Trump was elected president in 2016. By that point, the show had expanded to four and a half hours long and Griffin had asked Zucker for a producer credit. When he said no, she asked him, “Who do you think comes up with four and a half hours of material?” He wouldn’t budge. “And in my opinion, that’s sexism,” she says.
But even more egregious to Griffin was when he tried to censor her material. “I’ll never forget, he called me—rare that Jeff would call me at home,” she says. He told her, “I’ll give you one Trump joke per hour.”
“And once again, I go, ‘Jeff, you’re the head of a global news organization,’” she says. “‘You hired Kathy Griffin. Not like Jerry Seinfeld, who never curses. You know what you’re getting, you know I’m a ratings grabber, you know that Anderson and I have genuine chemistry. I know it’s only one night a year, but why are you limiting me? Because Trump could not be more in the zeitgeist.’”
She says he replied, “I just don’t want to deal with it.”
“So I would just like to say, I feel like I have bigger balls than Jeff Zucker,” Griffin says. “Or Jeff Fucker as I now call him.”
Next week on The Last Laugh podcast: Stand-up comedian and soon-to-be star of his own ABC sitcom, Nate Bargatze.
