Kathy Griffin is opening up about a painful chapter of her life involving her eldest brother, Kenneth.
In a recent YouTube video, Griffin, 65, mourned the deaths of Rob Reiner and wife Michele Singer Reiner, whose son Nick stands accused of their murder, and relayed details about her own family’s struggles with Kenneth, who died in 2001. (Griffin is the youngest of five children, growing up with brothers Kenneth, Gary and John, and sister Joyce.)
“I’m going to open up to you about something now that I haven’t really talked about since my first book. When I talked about it, the rest of my family was very, very upset with me,” she said in the video, referring to her 2009 memoir, Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin. “Well, my eldest brother, Kenneth — who is now dead, thank God — he was a crack addict, he lived on the streets, was extremely violent. [He] probably had an undiagnosed mental illness that obviously did not go well with crack cocaine.”
Griffin continued, “I can just tell you it was heartbreaking watching my parents try to save him his whole life. I think the problem started with my brother — from their telling to me — when he was in his teen years. My mom would get emotional and cry and say, ‘When he was a kid, we never could have seen this coming. He was a happy kid. Where did this come from?’”
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According to Griffin, when she was just 10 years old, Kenneth’s first wife told her that Kenneth used to “beat her so badly that it was almost inconceivable.” Later, Griffin said, a girlfriend of Kenneth’s told her “that he was also violent with her.”
Griffin alleged that Kenneth’s then-girlfriend “told me that he was molesting one boy and one girl that she knew of.”
The comedian said, “So, for all the ways that the Trumpers use the word ‘pedo,’ and all the stuff we have learned about Jeffrey Epstein, let me tell you something. Having your oldest brother be a pedophile is something that you don’t ever grow out of. You don’t get over it.”
“I wanted to kill him because all I could think about were those children. And the expression ‘blood is thicker than water’ was not true in my case. I didn’t give a f*** that he was my older brother, and I did not want to protect him,” she said.
Griffin said that she had periods of separation “from the rest of my family because I would never face or deal with my eldest brother Kenneth again without just laying into him.”
“I wouldn’t have holidays [with my family] if Kenneth was going to be there. We used to have two Christmases at our house, and it’s because of me,” she said. “But I just said, ‘I’m not going to sit in a room with Kenneth once a year and act like he’s not a wife-beating pedophile.’”
The former My Life on the D-List star said she repeatedly reported her brother to the police but claimed they “would never do anything about it.”
“I was calling, like, once a week on my own brother, and they wouldn’t do anything,” she said, adding that she doesn’t “know if any of my relatives know that to this day.”
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“But f*** the ‘blood is thicker than water’ [saying]. These are kids,” she said.
Griffin alleged that the police told her that they could only take action if the children came forward themselves. “These are children. You can’t expect them to think like adults,” she reasoned.
As for her family, Griffin said, “I watched my parents do everything from act like my brother was wrongly accused, to admitting it but not knowing what to do, to being convinced it was only [because of] the crack that he was on, as opposed to other issues as well.”
One Christmas, Griffin said her father, John, confronted Kenneth. “My dad called Kenneth and said, ‘You know why Kathleen isn’t coming to Christmas? It’s because she really thinks you are a child molester.’ And do you know what my brother Kenneth’s response was? ‘I do what I do,’” Griffin said.
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Griffin previously accused her eldest brother of child molestation in her 2009 memoir, and also during a September 2009 interview on CNN’s Larry King Live.
“Well, first of all, when I was a little girl, he was very sexually inappropriate with me and he — you know, he never — I don’t know what the word is for it. I call it sexually inappropriate,” she told host Larry King. “But when I was a little kid, I would be in my bed and he [would] creep into my bed.”
Griffin claimed that “he creeped into my bed and sort of whispered sweet nothings in my ear,” adding that Kenneth “put our family through a lot.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing child abuse, call or text Child Help Hotline at 1-800-422-4453.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
