In The Know

Kathy Griffin didn’t realize ‘how serious’ DOJ was about charging her over Trump head photo 

Kathy Griffin said Tuesday she didn’t realize “how serious” the Department of Justice (DOJ) was about her controversial photo of her holding a bloody fake replica of former President Trump’s head.

“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,” the comedian said on the “Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson” podcast.

Griffin said it was her ”own stupidity” in thinking that people “were ready to realize the level of dangerous that” the former president is. She said she took the photo alongside other ones and that she thought they would be on “Instagram for two days, or maybe a gay blog.”

A few years ago, in an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Griffin said the Secret Service and the assistant U.S. attorney’s office were putting her “under a two-month federal investigation” and were considering charging her “with a crime — this is real — of conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States.”

She also said that she was put on the “no-fly list” and the International Criminal Police Organization list, resulting in her getting stopped at every international airport.


“Anderson Cooper said I was disgusting, and I lost about 75 percent of my friends that never came back. And it was hard,” she told Colbert.

The former president posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that Griffin should be “ashamed of herself” for the photo after she posed for it.

“Kathy Griffin should be ashamed of herself. My children, especially my 11 year old son, Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick!” Trump said.