Rosie O’Donnell on 2007 Elisabeth Hasselbeck Conflict: ‘Was a Set Up’

Rosie O’Donnell believes her on-air 2007 argument with Elisabeth Hasselbeck was staged by producers.

Discussing the conflict on ABC’s The View when O’Donnell first served as a cohost virtually twenty years in the past, throughout an Australian radio interview, O’Donnell didn’t mince her phrases. “The entire thing, I believe, was a set-up,” O’Donnell stated on Nova’s Ricki-Lee, Tim & Joel program on Monday, October 6.

Referring to the argument’s visible manufacturing, which included a split-screen that confirmed O’Donnell and Hasselbeck, 48, arguing onscreen without delay, O’Donnell famous, “Our producer [was] not an ‘on-the-fly type of man’… he wouldn’t have been like, ‘Let’s go to a cut up display screen.’ That was ready.”

The cohosts’ huge bust-up noticed their misaligned political views attain boiling level after a number of on-air disagreements all through the daytime discuss present’s tenth season.

Yelling at each other from throughout the panel as fellow hosts Sherri Shepherd and Pleasure Behar watched on, O’Donnell and Hasselbeck slung insults forwards and backwards for round ten minutes. Whereas revisiting the argument throughout her new interview, O’Donnell stated she felt shocked on the time to stir such a response from Hasselbeck.

“What I used to be considering the entire time was, ‘I can not consider that this lady, in spite of everything I did for her,’ “ O’Donnell mirrored. “Once I took that job, I made one dedication to myself, that I used to be not going to be her enemy [and] that I used to be going to satisfy her as an individual.”

O’Donnell claimed she took Hasselbeck below her wing when the pair started to get to know one another. “She got here to my home. She swam in my pool, she introduced her little child. I took her child to Sesame Avenue Dwell. I took her to her first Broadway opening,” O’Donnell stated. “I bent over backwards for this lady, and right here she was coming at me on nationwide TV about whether or not or not I used to be patriotic.”

The Flintstones actress additionally revealed what went down after the cameras stopped rolling, together with her resolution to depart The View in consequence. “Once I went off the stage that day, I went to my dressing room to pack all my stuff up, return and do the remainder of the segments … and walked out and by no means went again,” O’Donnell stated. “It felt to me like I used to be on a basketball workforce of 5 girls, and certainly one of them stored tripping me on my strategy to the ring … this [was] imagined to be my workforce.”

O’Donnell’s want to exit was confirmed through an announcement launched by ABC on the time which detailed that she had requested to be launched from her contract with The View. The community and O’Donnell agreed to chop her settlement quick on Might 25, 2007. (O’Donnell did return to The View in 2024, however left the present after 5 months as a result of private causes.)

Of the community’s resolution to chop O’Donnell’s contract quick, she stated on radio that it was a sensible transfer. “They have been proper to have me go away that present,” she stated. “It isn’t the easiest way for me to serve the expertise and the folks, as a result of arguing about ridiculous, made up issues is a approach for a sluggish loss of life.”