Kathy Griffin has never exactly blended into the background, but even by her standards, her latest confession turned heads. The comedian, now 65, has revealed that after her split from ex-husband Randy Bick, she tumbled into a romance with a 23-year-old that left her genuinely smitten and rethinking what dating after divorce can look like in your sixties. The relationship is over, but the story she is telling about it is very much alive, and it is forcing a fresh conversation about age gaps, power, and who is “allowed” to fall hard for someone decades younger.
What makes Griffin’s revelation so striking is not just the 42-year age difference, but the way she talks about it: not as a punchline, but as a real love affair that arrived when she least expected it. Coming from a woman who has built a career on skewering celebrity culture, her openness about being vulnerable, giddy, and a little reckless at 65 lands like a challenge to every script about how older women are supposed to behave.
The divorce, the reset, and the surprise 23-year-old
Griffin’s love life has always been part of her act, but the end of her marriage to marketing executive Randy Bick marked a more serious turning point. Their relationship, with Bick 18 years her junior, had already pushed against norms, and their split left her navigating single life again after a long stretch as a wife. According to reporting on her personal timeline, the comedian’s separation from Bick was followed by a formal end to the marriage, with the legal process wrapping up after their relationship had already unraveled, as reflected in biographical details that note how Griffin and Bick’s divorce was finalized in early 2025. That left her, in her mid-sixties, staring down the question of what dating would even look like now.
What happened next was not some carefully planned “new chapter,” but a collision with someone far outside the demographic box most people would expect. Griffin has said that at 65 she “fell in love” with a 23-year-old, describing the connection as a genuine romance that unfolded after the end of her marriage to Randy Bick. She has framed it as a post-divorce fling that surprised even her, explaining that she had not been with anyone since the split and then suddenly found herself wrapped up in a relationship with a man more than four decades younger, a dynamic she later described in detail when she revealed the post-divorce fling publicly.
Inside the “secret romance” she says she “really was in love” with
Griffin has not named the 23-year-old, and that anonymity is part of what makes the story feel more like a confession than a celebrity rollout. She has instead focused on how the relationship made her feel, calling it a “secret romance” that unfolded quietly while the public was still catching up to the news of her divorce. In recounting the affair, she has emphasized that she “really was in love,” pushing back on the idea that a woman in her sixties dating a man in his early twenties must be chasing validation or a joke. Her description of the relationship as a genuine emotional entanglement, rather than a casual fling, comes through clearly in her account of the secret romance with a 23-year-old that followed her split from Bick.
She has also been candid about the timing, explaining that the relationship emerged after the divorce and during a period when she was still figuring out who she was without Randy Bick. In one detailed retelling, she framed the affair as something that unfolded “after her divorce” and underscored that she “Really Was” in love with this much younger man, language that underscores how seriously she took the connection despite its short lifespan. That framing appears again in coverage that highlights how Kathy Griffin Details Secret Romance with a 23-Year-Old After Her Divorce from Randy Bick and insists she “Really Was” in love, a choice of words that signals she is not interested in minimizing what happened just because the age gap makes people uncomfortable.
How she says she “accidentally” fell for someone four decades younger
Griffin has described the whole thing as something she “accidentally” fell into, which is a telling word choice for a woman who has built a career on control, timing, and punchlines. In a reflective essay about dating after 60, she talked about how love can sneak up on you even when you think you have aged out of that kind of chaos, painting a picture of a woman who was not hunting for a younger partner so much as blindsided by chemistry. That perspective is laid out in a first-person account of how she, as a comedian in her sixties, found herself dating after 60 and suddenly entangled with someone 23, a narrative that treats the relationship as part of a broader exploration of sex, aging, and vulnerability.
She has also leaned into the language of surprise when talking about the emotional fallout. In a separate passage from the same reflective project, Griffin is quoted in a section titled “It’s Been a Year,” where she looks back on what 2025 taught her and admits that the romance with the 23-year-old was both exhilarating and destabilizing. That retrospective, which includes a Photo by Molly Matalon and Griffin’s own line about how “Nobody scares me,” frames the fling as part of a year-long reckoning with fear, aging, and the risk of opening herself up again after a bruising few years both personally and professionally.
Why her 65-and-23 pairing is sparking a bigger age-gap debate
Griffin’s story is not happening in a vacuum. Her decision to talk openly about falling for a 23-year-old at 65 has quickly become a flashpoint in a broader conversation about age-gap relationships, especially when the older partner is a woman. Coverage of her fling has framed it as a case study in how people react differently when the genders are flipped, noting that the same culture that shrugs at older male stars dating women in their twenties often recoils when a woman does it. One analysis of Kathy Griffin, her fling with a 23-year-old and age-gap relationships argues that the backlash says as much about cultural discomfort with older women’s sexuality as it does about any specific concern for the younger partner.
That same discussion points out that Griffin is hardly new to dating younger men, given that Randy Bick was already 18 years her junior, but the leap from that gap to a 42-year spread hits differently for many observers. The coverage, written by Charles Trepany, situates Griffin’s romance within a larger trend of public debates about power and consent in relationships with large age differences, while also reminding readers that she had already made a younger partner “red carpet official” in late 2024. In that context, the piece by Charles Trepany for USA TODAY uses Griffin’s story to ask whether the outrage is really about the number 23, or about the idea that a woman in her sixties might still be allowed to chase intense, messy love instead of settling into a quieter, more palatable version of midlife.
What Griffin’s late-in-life fling says about love, aging, and who gets to take risks
For Griffin, the romance with the 23-year-old seems to have become less about the man himself and more about what the experience revealed about her own fears and desires. She has spoken about how love can show up when you least expect it, especially after a divorce that leaves you convinced the big chapters are behind you. In one account of her post-divorce journey, she is described reflecting on how she fell in love with a 23-year-old after ending her marriage, with the narrative emphasizing that “Love can often come when we least expect it” and noting explicitly that Kathy is 65. That framing, captured in a piece that details how Kathy Griffin Reveals How She Fell in Love With a 23-Year-Old After Divorce, positions her not as a punchline but as a woman who is still willing to be surprised by her own heart.
Her willingness to talk about the fling in such detail has also invited more tabloid-style coverage, which zeroes in on the shock factor of a 65-year-old comedian dating a 23-year-old. One widely shared report highlighted that Kathy Griffin, 65, revealed she fell in love with a 23-year-old following her divorce from Randy Bick, treating the age gap as the headline hook while still acknowledging that she described the relationship in serious, emotional terms. That story, which notes that Kathy Griffin, 65, reveals she fell in love with a 23-year-old after her split from Bick, captures the tension at the heart of the reaction: people are fascinated, a little scandalized, and maybe not entirely sure what to do with a woman who refuses to age out of romantic risk.
Griffin herself seems content to let the story sit in that messy space. She has framed the fling as both a genuine love affair and a learning experience, one that forced her to confront how she sees herself as an older woman in a culture that still treats youth as the default setting for desire. In doing so, she has also given other women in their fifties, sixties, and beyond a high-profile example of what it looks like to keep saying yes to unexpected connections, even when the numbers on paper make people gasp. That is not a neat moral, and it is not meant to be. It is simply Kathy Griffin, at 65, telling the world that she fell hard for a 23-year-old and lived to talk about it, a story that now sits alongside other reflections on how she has been dating after 60 and navigating love, sex, and aging on her own unapologetic terms.
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