It’s been nearly seven years since Kathy Griffin posed with a fake severed head of then President Donald Trump, but it’s only recently that she’s learned the serious consequences she could have faced.
“I actually just got a FOIA back, Freedom of Information Act, recently, expressing how serious they were about trying to charge me with the crime of conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States,” she said during an appearance on the “Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson” podcast.
The jarring video, which received extensive media coverage, showed Griffin hold a severed, bloody head that resembled Trump.
The reaction from both sides of the aisle was swift.
“Kathy Griffin should be ashamed of herself,” Trump wrote on Twitter at the time. “My children, especially my 11 year old son, Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick!”
It even appeared the Secret Service was interested in the video as they tweeted they were “on it” after many alerted the agency to the viral video.
Griffin issued an apology begging for forgiveness, though she later admitted to having no regrets in participating in the controversial photoshoot.
“But I cannot regret this photo, I know it will be a forever part of my life. I am willing to live with that legacy if it means being able to challenge the vitriol and misogyny spewed by our President,” she wrote in a blog post.
During a 2018 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Griffin explained she was involved in a two-month federal investigation.
“Actually two federal agencies, the Secret Service and the assistant U.S. attorney’s office, were putting me under a two-month federal investigation and considering charging me with a crime — this is real — of conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States,” she told Colbert.
“That’s where your tax dollars went, everybody, investigating Kathy Griffin,” she joked.
Griffin stated she was even added to the “no-fly list” and Interpol list, meaning she anytime she flew through an international airport she would get stopped.
But it was only recently that she realized the seriousness of the situation.
She claimed it was her “own stupidity” for believing people “were ready to realize the level of dangerous that” Trump was. Griffin said she thought they would be on “Instagram for two days, or maybe a gay blog.”
No matter your feelings on the president, it’s never acceptable to even pretend to behead them.
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