Comedian Kathy Griffin is working on making her comeback after a photo of her holding a bloody, decapitated bust of Donald Trump’s head sparked outrage. As she told Howard Stern on his SiriusXM radio show Tuesday, she’s had to tread especially carefully during her road back to her former life on the D-list.
Back in July, journalist Yashar Ali reported that Griffin was being investigated by the secret service, and she explained the trouble that caused her during her international stand up comedy tour.
“I want to know if I can route a tour in a very unusual way. Can you send me overseas to cities and countries where they can’t stand Trump. And I had that tour in two weeks,” Griffin told Stern. “I went to 15 countries and 23 cities, and I was detained at every. single. airport.”
Griffin described the fear she had in each new city, saying that the amount of time she was detained varied between 20 minutes to over an hour or more.
“It’s scary because you don’t know what they’ve said. So then they take your passport, they take your devices, they send you to a room, and you sit there not knowing what’s going to happen next.”
Even scarier for Griffin was that her status as a celebrity didn’t help either, and she wondered if she was considered an actual security threat.
“I don’t know if the guy in Singapore knew I was a comedian. I went to Reykjavik, Iceland, honey,” Griffin said. “I to this day did not have the courage or balls to ask even one person in all these airports, hey what was the problem? I was too scared. I’ve got a show at 8:00.”
Griffin has walked back her previous apology to President Trump over the photo, and she recently booked a comeback show as part of her world tour at Carnegie Hall that sold out within a day.
“For most of the past year I was convinced that my career was over…I have felt moments of despair that I can’t describe in a tweet. Thank you from the bottom of my heart…I am so grateful,” Griffin tweeted.
Listen to the audio from Griffin’s interview on “The Howard Stern Show” here.