Kathy Griffin is the latest celebrity to weigh in on the conviction and 30-years-to-life sentencing of “That ’70s Show” star Danny Masterson for raping two women.
Sharing a video first to TikTok and then Instagram, the comedian denounced the actor’s former costars Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis for writing “character letters” on his behalf, and then opened up about her own experience with sexual abuse within her family and why she tends to “absolutely believe the victims.”
“I’m weighing in on the whole Danny Masterson, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis thing because, you know, it’s so difficult to get a conviction in a rape trial, it’s almost impossible,” Griffin said. She prefaced the video with a sticker reading “trigger warning PSA” and a caption reading, “A hell of a lot of people are responding to this video on TikTok. So, I am putting it up here. This is extremely sensitive stuff. Let me know your thoughts.”
“Most prosecutors — well, all prosecutors — will not even bring a case to trial unless there’s an incredible amount of evidence because it turns into a he said-she said, and historically juries are very trepidatious, to say the least, of convicting a guy of S.A. because there’s still a lot of stigma about whether or not the woman asked for it, etc.,” she continued. “But the notion that this guy was also convicted of drugging these women — and I believe this case was only two women… But, you know, that is such serious stuff that I don’t really care that when they were working on ‘That ’70s Show’ he was, like, a good guy to work with.”
After an aside deriding the Church of Scientology and Masterson’s involvement within it a “cult” — “and a deadly one at that” — Griffin turned her attention to her late brother, Ken, who she identified as a pedophile while explaining why everyone should “believe the victims” of sexual abuse.
“I wrote about it in my first book, and it was a horrible, horrible thing, and I tried to get him caught,” she said. “Now, this was my brother. So I don’t want to hear about Ashton and Mila and Giovanni Ribisi and people that feel like they had to stick up for Danny Masterson because he was their bro, he was their buddy. This was my own brother.”
The comedian then recounted how her efforts to get the LAPD to intervene on her brother’s behavior were met with impossible bureaucratic hurtles and alienated her from her family.
“The difficulty of getting a conviction in S.A. cases, the bar is so high that I tend to absolutely believe the victims when there’s even a trial because it’s so hard to even get to a trial,” she continued.
“But the point is, blood was not thicker than water in my case, and if you know that somebody is committing S.A., you should do something if you can. My God, at least try,” she said. “So, anyway, there’s my 2 cents about this, and that’s why I find this whole case so, um, it brings up a lot of emotions in me, and it should in all of us. So believe the victims. For people to even go to the police, they don’t do it lightly, they don’t do it lightly. That’s just my observation.”
On Thursday, Masterson was sentenced to 30 years-to-life in prison for two counts of rape. Kutcher and Kunis wrote letters to Judge Charlaine Olmedo as testaments to his character before subsequently issuing a video apology after the contents of those letters were made public.
Watch Griffin’s post in the video above.
