Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, is used to random men on the internet explaining how they want to kill her.
“What color rope do you want when we punish you?” one user messaged Griswold, adding, “It’s called treason you chicken shit cunt.”
“Start with a 2×4 across the face of the hag, then go from there,” another wrote online.
“I hope Donald Trump wins and he sends his Department of Justice to investigate you and throw you in prison,” another person wrote. “You stupid fucking bitch. Fuck off. I can’t wait to find you and follow you to your house and expose your address.” Other messages say Griswold ought to be in jail, and they detail the sexual violence they hope she experiences there.
Ever since Griswold began to publicly defy Donald Trump on everything from his unfounded assertion that he won the 2020 election to his attacks on voting access and abortion access, she has become accustomed to the online vitriol sent from users who opt for profile photos of the president. She became the youngest elected Secretary of State in the US in 2018 and told me that “the hardest part” of her last six and a half years in office has been the perilous environment. “Women who stood up to Trump after he tried to steal the election—and after he lied through his teeth to the American people in 2020—have been faced with major retribution.”
Still, despite, or maybe because of, the persistent threats to her life, Griswold, who is nearing the end of her two terms as secretary of state, is running to stay in the Colorado government as attorney general. She announced her run in early April, telling The Colorado Sun that she can be the “strong, proven leader” who can “stand up” to Trump. The Sun also reported that Griswold “faced scrutiny last year over how a staffer in her office accidentally posted election system passwords online.” The mistake did not give outsiders access to sensitive election systems, according to statements from Griswold and her team, because multiple passwords are required to gain access.
Griswold is probably best known nationally for her testimony in front of the Supreme Court in January 2024, when she urged the justices to keep Trump off her state’s 2024 ballot because he is an “ineligible insurrectionist.” In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Griswold explains why she’s hell-bent on holding the president to account, despite death threats.
Vanity Fair: It’s been one month since you announced your run for attorney general. How is it different from when you announced your first run for secretary of state?
Jena Griswold: It’s night and day. When I announced for secretary of state, I was 32; I had never run for office before; I announced I was going to run against a Republican incumbent for a seat a Democrat had not won in 60 years. So it’s very much a different situation.
On the campaign trail, it’s been—I guess I wouldn’t say great—but very motivating to meet with Coloradans. Nothing that’s happening in this country right now is great. But you see Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated people who clearly recognize that Trump is a threat to our freedoms and our democracy, and are willing to put in the work to win in 2026 and protect, really, the soul of what it means to be the United States.
What are you hearing?
It’s interesting that since 2020, at nearly every event I’ve had, someone will come up to me and say, “I want to let you know I’m a Republican, and I support you.” And they think they’re the only Republican. But really, there’s a lot of fear, and to an extent, I think despair from what is coming from the Trump administration. Trump is breaking the law and undermining the Constitution on a daily basis, and there is so much illegality and bad decision-making happening from Trump that it’s overwhelming to people, and I think it’s really important to recognize that, because the chaos is part of the strategy. Trump is trying to overwhelm the American people. He’s trying to overwhelm Coloradans, but I think that they do not understand that Americans will not accept his unlawful and cruel behavior. Overall, I think folks are really fired up.
Colorado, along with other states, sued the Trump administration in April over an executive order targeting voting access. Can you talk about how that came about?
Trump is trying to power grab in an unlawful and unconstitutional way. He issued an executive order that had the potential of disenfranchising Coloradans and Americans all across the country in a way that he does not have the power to do. So we ultimately filed a lawsuit.
Anything that we can stop, we’re going to stop.
You’ve also been vocally against the SAVE Act, which, among other things, would require all voters to provide proof of US citizenship when first signing up to vote or updating their voter registration.
It would disproportionately affect blue-collar folks, the middle class, and women. This is more of what we have seen from Republicans who cower to Trump, who tried to take away Americans’ voices because they’re afraid to actually compete on their ideas. This bill is disastrous to the right to vote. It doesn’t matter if you have disposable income in your bank account; you should be able to cast a ballot. It doesn’t matter if you’re a woman who got married and didn’t change the name on her birth certificate; you should be able to make your voice heard.
With Colorado being one of the states that has furthered protections for those seeking abortions, I’m wondering, what attacks are you seeing statewide?
Well, I think Colorado has shown time and time again, in a bipartisan way, that we trust women and women’s rights to choose. I’m really proud of the work we did last year to pass the initiative to really codify rights into our Constitution. With that said, what happens across the nation affects us. Pregnant women should be able to travel without worrying that they may lose their lives if they go to the wrong state.
We have seen talk from MAGA Republicans about attacking birth control, about attacking IVF. In our pregnancy journey, we used IVF. Ultimately, if there is federal legislation, it will affect every state in this country and every American in this country. It’s a grand irony that the MAGA Republicans say they care about families when they were willing to threaten me when I was pregnant. They threatened my little baby. This comes down to basic human rights and human respect. Holding the line in Colorado affects not just Coloradans, it affects the families and the women who flock to our state because they are not being respected in their own state, and it puts their lives at risk.
Similar to what happened with the New York provider who was charged with allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a Louisiana resident, would you also be protecting doctors who may choose to travel to, say, Texas or Florida, or help provide abortion care in those states, and face threats and potential repercussions from local elected officials?
I will do everything in my power to make sure that doctors, medical care providers, women, and families do not face prosecution for making deeply personal choices and practicing modern medicine.
I’m curious if running for attorney general was always in the plan, or if you were inspired to do this, perhaps, by your experience following 2020 or just your experience in these past six years in office.
When you grow up like me, you don’t have a plan to run for office. That was no grand plan. You know, I grew up in a canyon leading up to one of the most beautiful towns in the United States. I started working the summer after seventh grade. I was never pushed to go to college. After I started working so young, it made me realize that there wasn’t something wrong with my family. There was something wrong for a lot of families. A lot of families were struggling, and ultimately, that’s why I went to college. That’s why I went to law school. I just wanted to make things more fair for blue collar families like mine. Trump lied through his teeth to the American public, saying that he would help blue collar families like mine. That guy cares about one thing, and it’s himself. That’s it. I’m running for AG because I believe it’s one of the best positions in elected office to help people and to protect our rights.
If you become attorney general for Colorado, how much of the work do you think will be holding the Trump administration to account?
I think a lot of the work. The country is in crisis. We have an administration trying to power grab, trying to stomp on our fundamental freedoms—from the freedom to vote to the freedom of bodily autonomy for women. We have an administration that is unlawfully sending the country into economic chaos. Over the last six and a half years, I’ve been the youngest Secretary of State in the nation; I’m one of the few women to ever win statewide executive office; I would guess that I am the first statewide elected official in Colorado to have a baby while in executive office—and I was pregnant post-Dobbs. Even as a statewide elected official, I had to ask myself, while pregnant, am I willing to go to a state like Texas or a state that has rolled back reproductive freedoms? If something happens to my pregnancy, does that mean my life, because I’m traveling?
Is it just Trump? The answer to that is absolutely not. We’ve seen Republicans in Congress bend to the will of billionaires and give an unelected billionaire the ability to gut protections of the federal government. I know what it means to struggle. I’m going to be standing for the middle class, taking on corporate polluters, defending families, and pushing for common sense gun reform. We also have an issue in the state of Colorado that if a woman is raped, it takes up to a year and a half to process the rape kit. That’s absolutely unacceptable, absolutely unacceptable. So there’s so much work that needs to be done.
I would encourage everybody to think about, what does it take to meet this moment? And honestly, the answer is complex, but I think it comes down to courage and bravery to be able to stand up to protect our freedoms against a machine that is looking to grab. And when you stand up to them, it will come with retribution.
Speaking of retribution, I wanted to ask you about the death threats that you’ve received. I was sent some of them, and one that stood out to me was a message asking you what color of rope you would prefer to be punished with. Do those threats scare you?
Absolutely. I think any person, when they are repeatedly told how someone is going to come kill them, would be scared. But I think again, the question isn’t “Is there fear?” The question is, “Is there courage?” I’ll tell you, the hardest part of the last six and a half years has been the threat environment. Women who stood up to Trump after he tried to steal the election—and after he lied through his teeth to the American people in 2020—have been faced with major retribution. You know, there’s so much that I could say about what it means to be a woman in statewide office right now. Like, even in some of the most personal moments of my life, including when I was in the hospital delivering our baby, someone was arrested for threatening my life.
I think at the end of the day, it’s important to understand that these threats are intentional. The goal is to discourage women like me from holding office or giving a name to what is happening in this country. I will never be silenced from standing up for our fundamental rights in our democracy. I will never be deterred from protecting our Constitution and our nation. But with that said, this threat environment is so unacceptable. This is the moment where we need brave people to lean in, but we also need states to protect women elected officials so that we can do our jobs.
When I started to get threats, people would ask me how I was dealing with stress, and it’s like, well, I’m dealing with stress fine, but someone just told me seven times they’re going to come hang me from a tree and I really hope someone would take this seriously.
So many of these threats are using such specific gendered language—or bringing up your children. Do you still read them? Do you suggest that other people read them? How do you even think about consuming that amount of vitriol?
Again, this has been the hardest part of my term. I started to receive threats in the summer of 2021 when Lauren Boebert and Ted Cruz lied and said that I had stopped bipartisan audits of elections. They were lying, and I started to get people sending me messages. “I’m going to hang you from a tree. Tell me how long you want the rope to be.” There was no one looking at the threats. In 2021, there was no way to gather the threats, and so I literally would have to go through social media and screenshot it all and give it to the State Patrol.
Trailblazing comes in so many shapes and forms, and many trailblazing opportunities you do not even want to have. One of the things that I was able to set up is a law enforcement apparatus so that I myself do not have to go through all of these threats. And I hope that makes the path easier for other women who run for office. With that said, I still do see a lot of the threats. They’re coming to me in all different ways—voicemails, text messages to my personal phone, DMs. So I think there’s a balance. But ultimately, if there is a real, serious threat, I need to know about it. This is a tool of the MAGA movement.
Trump tweeted out—or “untruthed” or whatever—a video about me during the lawsuit to disqualify him from president. He posted the biography of Shenna Bellows, the Secretary of State in Maine. He didn’t even have to say anything, and she was SWAT-ed. It is a tremendous toll on me and my family. But I have security in place, and I am not going to allow someone like Trump to ever intimidate me to stop. And it’s actually the opposite. It pisses me off so much that they would use threats of violence to try to go uncontested in their unconstitutional and unlawful behavior, that it makes me want to work even harder.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
See All the Fashion, Outfits, and Looks From the 2025 Met Gala Red Carpet
-
Hawk Tuah Opens Up About Her Crypto Scandal
-
Plus, Who Made VF’s Met Gala Best-Dressed List?
-
The Dystopian Coming-of-Age Story Stephen King Considered Too “Merciless” to Film
-
Wes Anderson’s Next Breakout Star Just So Happens to Be Kate Winslet’s Daughter
-
Alan Alda on Life With Parkinson’s, M*A*S*H, and Carol Burnett
-
Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Protein? Blame MAGA.
-
All of Quentin Tarantino’s Movies Ranked
-
Elon Musk’s 14 Children and Their Mothers (That We Know Of)
-
From the Archive: The Re-Happening of Diana Ross
The post Colorado’s Jena Griswold Got Over 1,800 Death and Harm Threats Last Year for Defying Trump: “It Pisses Me Off So Much” appeared first on Vanity Fair.
