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Comedian Kathy Griffin, who is currently touring with her My Life on the PTSD List North American tour—which included a performance at The Paramount venue in Huntington, Long Island, on Sunday—shared a video of Trump supporters protesting outside the venue and sarcastically thanked them for the free "publicity."
The protest was organized by a Trump-supporting group known as the America First Motor Club and orchestrated by the America First Warehouse in Ronkonkoma, New York, which bills itself as "America's most patriotic venue."
Griffin appeared gleeful in a post on X, formerly Twitter, writing:
"I couldn’t BUY publicity like this. Go to http://kathygriffin.com for tickets! I’m in the middle of doing 40 cities and I’m in heaven. These guys just want to spread hate on the outside of the theater, while my very inclusive audience gave me nothing but love last night inside the theater."
You can see her post below.
Griffin has been a favorite target of the MAGA crowd since she shared a now-infamous photo of herself holding a likeness of the severed head of former President Donald Trump. Griffin was savaged for the image. Soon afterward, she removed the photo from her social media accounts and asked for forgiveness.
The backlash cost Griffin marketing deals and her spot on CNN's New Year's Eve broadcast with Anderson Cooper. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Secret Service investigated her to determine if she was, in fact, a threat to the President.
Griffin later retracted her apology but the incident made the comedian—who has regularly courted controversy for her style of comedy—the poster child for "Trump derangement syndrome," angering many on the political right amid a national conversation on the limits of First Amendment rights.
The backlash against her continues—but many agreed that it's only helping her, not hurting her.
In an email statement to Newsweek, Griffin expressed her disbelief at the planned protest, saying:
"Are you kidding? Imagine a group of grown men spending their Sunday night with their Trump trucks with an effigy of my head and an effigy of President [Joe] Biden and their 'don't tread on me' flags. I don't know who they think is treading on them, but no one is treading on their rights."
"I fully support their First Amendment right to protest my show. My fantastic audience did nothing but flip them off, laugh, and take pictures of them. It's an awful lot of hate to be happening on the outside of a comedy show where a 63-year-old woman is doing jokes about celebrities and anything else that's happening in pop culture.
Griffin noted that her show was "sold out" and "filled with nothing but love, while outside, nothing but hate was on display."
In an appearance on The View after the protest, she said MAGA adherents are "crazed over me." She added that the protest "was kind of funny because they did have a bobbing redhead of me, an effigy, and they had — they were shouting ‘I’m a traitor’ and all this other stuff."
Griffin reiterated that her show's audience "came and saw it, so it was like hate on the outside and inclusive love and laughs on the inside and it was sold out.”