Andy Cohen is clearing up a joke he made about Kathy Griffin after she posted a scathing video against him.
As previously reported, TMZ photographers recently spoke to the Bravo host, 49, at Los Angeles International Airport and asked if he had spoken to the comedian, 56, since replacing her as the cohost on Anderson Cooper‘s New Year’s Eve special on CNN. “Who? I don’t know her,” Cohen joked with a smile, quoting Mariah Carey‘s infamous line about Jennifer Lopez. “I’m trying to remember [her].”
Griffin responded on Twitter shortly after and slammed Cohen’s remarks. “Even when it’s on tape, there are doubters? He is NOT kidding w paps,” she tweeted on Friday, October 27. “Was my boss for 10 years. Treated me like a dog. Deeply misogynistic.”
Cohen explained why he made the joke on Monday, October 30. “All I have to say about the mishegas of this weekend, and I only have one thing to say about this bag of bulls—t,” he said on his SiriusXM radio show, Andy Cohen Live, while explaining that he attempted to avoid the TMZ videographer’s questions about Griffin by deciding to “quote the great Mariah Carey, which is funny in my mind.”
“Usually with TMZ, you’re walking and you say your thing and you get in your car. Well, my driver parked on the second level of the parking lot. So we’re standing there all that time waiting for the elevator, and that’s why it kept going on and on,” Cohen continued. “And I didn’t really know how to pivot in the conversation. Like, ‘What, what, I don’t know!’ So I failed my Mariah impression.”
Griffin posted a 17-minute long YouTube video on Saturday, October 28, in which she claimed that the Bravo TV host offered her drugs on the set of Watch Happens Live With Andy Cohen. Cohen took to Twitter on Saturday to respond to the accusations, writing, “I am completely stunned by this story. It is 100% false and totally made up.” A Bravo spokesperson also told Us Weekly. “This is completely false and we are not going to credit it with any more attention.”
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