Kathy Griffin "hate-watched" Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen's New Year's Eve Live, says: "I wasn't canceled. I was erased"

The New York Times

In a New York Times profile, Katie Rosman writes of Griffin five years after her Trump beheading photo incident: "Griffin, now 61, has been trying to make her way back since then, brushing up against a litany of obstacles: partisan rage, sexism, Hollywood’s fear of getting pulped-by-association, the pandemic, pill addiction, lung cancer and her own reputation. All the while she has tried to puzzle out who among the culturally damned gets a second chance in our society, who doesn’t and why. She feels cast out in an extended Hollywood exile and believes it’s because she is a middle-aged woman who doesn’t have a big agency, film studio or television network financially invested in her professional rebirth. She does not lack for money — she says her net worth is $50 million — but she craves the one thing that has driven her for decades: work." “I just want to get back to making people laugh,” said Griffin. “More than anything else, that’s what has been robbed from me.” In the profile, Griffin recalls demanding that CNN president Jeff Zucker give her a raise just 10 days before what turned out to be her last New Year's Eve Live in 2016. She told him that she was carrying more of the prep work than Cooper and felt she deserved more than the $80,000 her contract called for. Zucker “got very offended,” Griffin said. “He started yelling at me and he literally said something like, ‘Who do you think you are calling here demanding a raise?’ And then something came over me. And I just lost it. I just started screaming. I’m Kathy (beep!) Griffin, Jeff, that’s who I am.” She then said to him, “I would really feel a lot more comfortable showing up if I got paid what I deserve.” Zucker took that as a threat to bail on the show, and in a call to Griffin’s lawyer, fired her. Griffin called Zucker again, begging him to take her back. Zucker rehired her, but she said he cut her pay by 20 percent. In an interview with The Times, Zucker called Griffin's demand for a raise so close to New Year’s Eve “completely out of line.” “It sounds like she is acknowledging that, insofar as Kathy Griffin acknowledges she has ever done anything wrong,” he said.