Not long after Rosie O’Donnell first joined The View in 2006, she became engaged in a public, years-long spat with Donald Trump. On a December 2006 episode of The View, O’Donnell referred to Trump as a “snake-oil salesman” who was both morally and financially bankrupt, which led Trump to attack her in the press, calling her a multitude of names on both Twitter and during TV appearances.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, O’Donnell recalled the fact that very few of her celebrity friends — with the exception of Madonna — publicly supported her during this time, and her boss at The View, Barbara Walters, even called Trump “to apologize for [Rosie’s] behavior.”
O’Donnell said that upon learning that Walters reached out to Trump, who was a friend of Walters’, the two women got into a “huge fight” right before a live show was about to be filmed.
“Barbara and I got in a huge fight, and it was about the Donald Trump thing,” O’Donnell remembered. “He published an open letter to me in the Post. In it, he wrote that she’d called him ‘to apologize for my behavior.’ I was like, ‘Whoa.’ We got into an argument in the makeup room that day.”
She continued, “I said, ‘I can’t believe that I haven’t heard from you during all of this time but that you’ve been communicating with him. Do you consider him your real friend, Barbara? I thought we had something real and something different than the way you’ve been treating me.’ It got loud, and people were in shock because nobody talked to her like that.”
O’Donnell then said that she struck a low blow: “I said something about her daughter, which I shouldn’t have said. She was hurt. And we were live in 20 minutes. Sometimes I go back and find that episode and I watch it, and I can see how tense it was. But I have apologized to her many times, and we got past it and saw each other [before her death in 2022].”
When asked what it was that she said about Walters’ daughter, O’Donnell told THR, “Nothing horrible, just that’s not the kind of relationship I have with my kid. ‘I don’t know what kind of relationship you have with your kid.'”
Rumors of this particular fight between the two women are well-documented (the tense episode that O’Donnell references appears to have been the one that aired January 8, 2007). In an article published by People in Januaray 2007, a spokesperson for The View told the magazine, “From the first day Rosie spoke about Donald Trump, Barbara has been nothing but supportive of Rosie. Whatever happened in the hair and makeup room was only a squabble. It’s business as usual. Everyone has moved on.”
It’s taken 16 years, but now the record is finally set straight on the matter.