She’s moved to Ireland. She’s befriended a Menendez brother, and she’s making documentaries. What’s next?
“It’s not my cello,” Rosie O’Donnell said over a video call, sitting on a grey love seat in a grey hoodie and a pair of chic brown glasses.
In New York, it was a Thursday morning. In Dublin, where the actress, comedian and former talk show host has been staying since mid-January, afternoon light streamed through a nearby window. The cello came with the rental.
Lots of celebrities talked during the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections about moving abroad if Donald Trump won – among them, Barbra Streisand, Cher, and Amy Schumer.
O’Donnell actually went through with it.
“I never thought he would win again,” she said of Trump, bringing up the television clips she watched last year of Kamala Harris, then the Vice-President, appearing at packed arenas in Pennsylvania and Michigan. “But I said, ‘If he does, I’m going to move,’ and my therapist said, ‘Well, let’s make a real plan.’”
It so happens that O’Donnell had reservations about discussing all this with a reporter.
Her application for Irish citizenship has not yet been approved and she is worried about doing anything to jeopardise that. Technically, she and her youngest child, Clay, who is autistic and nonbinary, are still just visiting the country.
That being said, O’Donnell has a documentary she wants to promote – Unleashing Hope: The Power of Service Dogs for Autism, the story of a programme in which incarcerated people train service dogs in prison, after which the dogs are placed with families like hers.
O’Donnell did appear on The Late Late Show, Ireland’s equivalent of The Tonight Show, a few weeks back. On it, she talked about her new life in the country, hurled some insults at Trump and gave every indication that she would be remaining over there for the foreseeable future.
But much of her focus at the moment is on the documentary, which was inspired partly by, of all things, her unlikely relationship with Lyle Menendez, the convicted murderer.
Finding the good in people
O’Donnell, of course, has been feuding with Trump since 2006, when she joined The View, a chatfest created by anchorwoman Barbara Walters.
On the show, in response to what she felt was Trump’s receiving overly positive coverage for his treatment of a controversy involving a Miss USA contestant, O’Donnell mocked Trump, flipping her hair over her face and delivering a withering impersonation while questioning his role as a moral arbiter and a successful businessperson.
Trump threatened to sue The View and Walters personally. Walters got on the phone with him to smooth things over. Soon enough, Trump was appearing all over cable news calling O’Donnell “wacko” and “fat,” and he said Walters personally told him that she regretted hiring O’Donnell.
The year after, despite soaring ratings, O’Donnell left the show. But her feud with Trump never ended.
She became a fixture and a punchline in the supermarket tabloids, which she always suspected, but was unable to prove, was the work of Trump and Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer who went to prison after pleading guilty to campaign-finance violations, tax fraud and bank fraud.
While incarcerated at the federal correctional facility in Otisville, New York, Cohen received what he said in a phone interview was a letter from O’Donnell. “It was so heartwarming and compassionate I actually thought I was being punked,” he said. She then visited Cohen in prison and was in touch with him in the days before Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
It may seem like a case of politics making strange bedfellows, but it was pretty typical behaviour for O’Donnell, who has a habit of finding the good in controversial people.
Friends of hers include Lynndie England, the former United States Army Reserve soldier who was prosecuted for mistreating detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. O’Donnell reached out to England during her 2005 trial, believing that she was being turned into a scapegoat for the injustices of the Iraq War.
And there is Reality Winner, the former military contractor who pleaded guilty to felony transmission of national defence information after leaking classified documents about Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, a nonprofit news site. During the trial, O’Donnell got in touch with Winner’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, and later had Winner on her podcast.
But no friendship of O’Donnell’s is more surprising than the one she has with Lyle Menendez, who with his brother, Erik, was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life without parole for the 1989 slaying of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez.
While the brothers were on trial in 1996, O’Donnell gave an interview on Larry King Live in which she said that she believed the brothers had been molested as children and that the murders were, in some way, an act of self-defence.
Soon after, she received a letter from Lyle Menendez.
In it, he thanked her for her support and stated his belief that she “knew” from a personal place that what he was saying was true. O’Donnell did: she said she and her siblings had been molested by their father.
But she did not reach out to him then.
“At that point, I had not ventured anywhere near this in my family or in my therapy,” she said last week.
In 2022, after watching a documentary about the Menendez brothers, O’Donnell discussed their case on TikTok, reiterating her belief that they were sexual abuse survivors who killed their parents out of a sense of trauma and desperation.
Soon after, she said, Lyle Menendez’s wife, Rebecca Sneed, reached out to her to see if she was interested in speaking with him.
Their first conversation lasted two or three hours, O’Donnell said.
“Then he started calling me on a regular basis from the tablet phone thing they have,” she said. “He would tell me about his life, what he’s been doing in prison and, for the first time in my life, I felt safe enough to trust and be vulnerable and love a straight man.”
Some of her friends expressed concern. “They were like, ‘Ro, he’s a murderer,’” she said.
She shrugged, then went to visit him in prison, where she saw scores of inmates with Labrador retrievers stationed silently at their feet.
O’Donnell asked Menendez how this could possibly be legal and he told her about a programme they had to train and place dogs with blind, disabled veterans and autistic children. He suggested O’Donnell get a dog for Clay through the programme.
O’Donnell said she felt uneasy at first. Clay is a highly verbal child and O’Donnell, aware of her celebrity status, did not want to jump in front of someone who could not function without a highly trained service dog. But Menendez told her not to worry: the dogs were distributed according to need.
A year later, she was approved for a dog.
O’Donnell spent two weeks commuting daily to the prison, where she was matched with Kuma, a black Labrador mix who had been trained for a year by Carlos Aguirre, an inmate doing time for armed robbery. (Although the dog winds up working principally with the autistic child, the intensive training takes place between the dog and an adult.)
Kuma bonded instantly with Clay when she came home. “I noticed the difference in Clay immediately,” she said. “I was shocked to find out that all the stories I heard from other mothers of autistic children were true.”
So O’Donnell decided to film a short documentary about the programme. The result of that, which was produced by Hilary Estey McLoughlin and Terrence Noonan – veterans of her late-1990s talk show – will be released on Hulu on April 22.
Adjusting to a new life
While the documentary was filming, O’Donnell read Project 2025, a document created by the Heritage Foundation that laid out a right-wing agenda for a potential second Trump term. She believed Trump when he said he would be a dictator on Day 1, and she did not believe him when he said Project 2025 reflected anything other than a specific plan for what he would do as President.
“World tragic events have always wiped me out emotionally,” she said. “I believe it stemmed from watching the Vietnam War on television as a little kid during dinner and seeing unbearably graphic horror on the news.”
The first Trump term was debilitating for her.
“I was unbelievably heavy, I was drinking too much,” she said. “But there were guardrails.”
In the campaign’s final weeks, she made preparations. Just in case.
“I got my passport renewed, I got Clay’s passport renewed,” she said. “My brother has his passport. All my cousins have their passports. But I was never a traveller.”
So moving to Ireland felt strange, although she has been pleasantly surprised by how much she likes it.
“I see reflections of myself in this country everywhere I look, and reflections of my family and my very Irish childhood,” she said. “We’re 100 per cent Irish. Being Irish Catholic was a very big part of my identity, and coming back here does feel like coming home in a way that’s hard to explain or understand, even for me.”
The people, she said, are unusually friendly. When they approach her in public, they do so in a way that feels “1,000% different than in the United States”.
There was an uncomfortable moment, however, when she watched Micheál Martin, the Prime Minister of Ireland, meet with Trump at the Oval Office during a televised appearance.
There, Brian Glenn, a reporter from the right-wing news outlet Real America’s Voice and the boyfriend of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, asked Martin why he was allowing O’Donnell to move there when all she could do was “bring unhappiness” to the country.
Martin seemed to wince in his chair. But he was able to avoid the question because Trump jumped in to say what a good question that was and went about insulting O’Donnell himself.
Afterward, O’Donnell sent Martin a letter saying how embarrassed she was to have become a topic of conversation during what should have been a serious meeting. He has not responded.
It was yet another chapter in a feud with Trump that has been going for nearly 20 years. But given O’Donnell’s seeming ability to forge relationships with various castaways, criminals and other notorious people, it seemed fair to ask: Could she see any good residing in him?
“None,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jacob Bernstein
Photographs by: Ellius Grace
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
