Why Anderson Cooper Ended His Friendship With Kathy Griffin Over Donald Trump

Comedian Kathy Griffin has pushed boundaries in the past, but a photoshoot in 2017 left many people thinking she'd gone too far, and it lost her work and her friendship with Anderson Cooper. Griffin was photographed holding a Donald Trump mask from a Halloween store, which was made to look like it was his severed bloody head using ketchup, and when the graphic picture was posted online, it set off a firestorm.

Griffin issued an apology for the image just a few hours after it started making the rounds on the internet, but that wasn't enough for everyone. The day after the photo was made public, Trump posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, about it: "My children, especially my 11-year-old son Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick!" While there doesn't seem to have been any love lost between Trump and Griffin, she also faced blowback from Cooper. Cooper responded by tweeting, "For the record, I am appalled by the photo shoot Kathy Griffin took part in. It is clearly disgusting and completely inappropriate."

Cooper and Griffin first met when Cooper was a guest on "Kathy's So-Called Reality" in 2001, and they co-hosted CNN's New Year's Eve special for a decade — Griffin was fired from the job after the outrage over her photo.

Anderson Cooper later said at a couple of different events in the weeks after the drama surrounding Kathy Griffin and the photo that the two were still friends, though he continued to decry the incident. At an event in June 2017, he said, "I said that [...] I didn't approve it in any way, and I think when you're friends with somebody you can say that," via Bravo TV.

But despite what Cooper was saying in public about still being friends with Griffin, the embattled comedienne wasn't hearing from him directly, and that was a big part of the problem when it came to their relationship. She told The Cut that she'd heard from some other people she'd worked with at CNN as the controversy raged, but Cooper took his time reaching out to her. When he did check in via text in August, over two months after the photo first came out, it sounds like Griffin had had enough, and she told him their friendship was over.

In an interview with Howard Stern on his SiriusXM show in 2018, Griffin revealed that they were closer when they first became friends, but, "then I think he's the type of guy who's into shiny objects, so later on he wasn't as into it."

Kathy Griffin was really impacted by the end of her friendship with Anderson Cooper, even years after it happened. She talked about Variety in 2019: "I was devastated. It still hurts. I mean, I really loved him. I don't have a punchline for that one."

As for how the photo got made in general, Griffin was taking part in a shoot with Tyler Shields, a photographer who had a history of pushing the envelope. Griffin told NPR that she had a specific request for one picture in the shoot, "I want to do some kind of a picture to shame Trump." Griffin was trying to make a commentary on what Trump had said about debate moderator Megyn Kelly in 2015 when he told CNN's Don Lemon that she had, "blood coming out of her whatever." Clearly, that message got overshadowed.

Along with losing her job with CNN and her friendship with Cooper, Griffin faced more backlash. She started getting death threats and was investigated by the Secret Service. She was put on the no-fly list for weeks. But she ended up going on tour overseas with a show called "Laugh Your Head Off World Tour," so Griffin seems to have done what she could to keep going after such a dramatic and public setback.