“It’s not my cello,” Rosie O’Donnell said on a video call.
It was a Thursday morning in New York. In Dublin, where the actress, comedian and former talk show host have been staying since mid-January, afternoon light was flowing through nearby windows. The cello comes with rental.
Many celebrities have spoken about moving abroad in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections if Donald J. Trump wins.
O’Donnell actually experienced it.
“I never thought he would win again,” she said of President Trump, raising a television clip she saw last year of Kamala Harris, who appeared in packed arenas in Pennsylvania and Michigan last year. “But I said, ‘If he does, I’ll move,’ and my therapist said, ‘Well, let’s have a real plan.’ ”
O’Donnell has reserved to discuss all of this with the reporter.
Her application for Irish citizenship has not yet been approved, and she is worried about doing something to put it at risk. Technically, she and her youngest child, Clay, are autistic and non-binary and are still only visiting the country.
That being said, O’Donnell has a documentary that wants to promote “Free Hope: The Power of Service Dogs for Autism,” a documentary that tells the story of a program in which incarcerated people train service dogs in prisons.
O’Donnell appeared in The Late Late Show, the equivalent of The Tonight Show a few weeks ago. On top of that, she spoke about her new life at home, casting some insults on Trump, giving every indication that she would stay there for a foreseeable future.
But much of her focus at this point is in the documentary. This was inspired by the unlikely relationship with convicted murderer Lyle Menendez, of all things.
Finding the good of people
Of course, O’Donnell has been countering Trump since joining The View, a chatfest created by anchor woman Barbara Walters.
On the show, according to what she felt, Trump received excessively positive coverage for the treatment of the controversy involving Miss USA contestants.
Trump threatened to personally sue Walters with “views.” Walters called with him to smooth things out. Soon, Trump appeared on Cable News calling “wacco” and “fat” and saying Walters personally said he regretted hiring O’Donnell.
The following year, O’Donnell left the show despite the rising ratings. However, her feud with Trump did not end. She became a fixture and punchline for supermarket tabloids, which she had always doubted and unable to prove, but Trump and Michael Cohen’s work was a former lawyer and fixer who went to prison after pleading guilty to campaign finances 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 Friday. “It was so heartwarming and caring and I actually thought I was being punctured,” he said. She then visited Cohen in prison and contacted him before Trump was found guilty of a 34-count counterfeit business record.
It may seem like a political case of making strange bed fellows, but it was pretty typical for O’Donnell, who is in the habit of finding good in controversial people.
Her friends include Lindy England, a former U.S. Army Reserve, who was charged with abusing a detainee at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. O’Donnell contacted England at a trial in 2005 and believed that she had become a scapegoat due to the injustice of the Iraq War.
And then there’s the real-life winner, a former military contractor who pleaded guilty to the communication of felony in defense information after leaking a classification document about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, a nonprofit news site. During the trial, O’Donnell contacted the winner’s mother, Billy Winner Davis, who later won the winner on a podcast.
But O’Donnell’s friendship is no surprise to him, not unlike his friendship with Lyle Menendez, who was convicted of murder along with his brother Eric and was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 1989 murder of his parents Jose and Kitty Menendez.
While the brothers were on trial in 1996, O’Donnell interviewed him about “Larry King Live,” where he believed the brothers were abused as children and believed that murder was somehow an act of self-defense.
Soon she received a letter from Lyle Menendez.
In it he thanked her for her support and stated his belief that what he was saying was “known” from his personal location. O’Donnell did that. She said she and her brother were abused by her father.
But she didn’t reach out to him.
“At that point, I wasn’t ventured near this with my family or my treatment,” she said last week.
In 2022, after watching a documentary about the Menendez brothers, O’Donnell discussed their lawsuits regarding Tiktok, repeatedly reiterating her belief that they were survivors of sexual abuse who killed their parents out of a sense of trauma and despair.
Soon she said that Lyle Menendez’s wife, Rebecca Snead, contacted her to see if she was interested in talking to him.
Their initial conversation lasted for a few hours, O’Donnell said.
“Then he started calling me regularly from the tablet phones they had,” she said. “He told me about his life, what he does in prison, and for the first time in my life I felt safe enough to trust, be vulnerable and love a straight man.”
Several of her friends expressed concern. “They were like, ‘Ro, he’s a murderer,'” she said.
She shrugged and visited him in prison. There, she saw the prisoner’s scores with Labrador retrievers quietly stationed at her feet.
O’Donnell asked Menendez how this was legal and told her about a program where dogs must be trained and placed with blind, disabled veterans and children with autism. He suggested that O’Donnell keep a dog for clay through the program.
O’Donnell said he felt uneasy at first. Clay is a very verbal child, and O’Donnell recognizes her celebrity status and didn’t want to fly before someone who couldn’t function without a highly trained service dog. However, Mr. Menendez told her not to worry: the dogs were distributed as needed.
A year later, she was approved for the dog.
O’Donnell commutes to work two weeks a day and goes to prison. There she matched with the Bear, a black Labrador mix that she had been trained for a year. Carlos Aguirreprisoners taking time to rob an armed robber. (Dogs work mostly with children with autism, but intensive training is done between dogs and adults.)
The bear joined instantly when the clay returned home. “I quickly noticed the difference in clay,” she said. “I was shocked to learn that everything I heard from other mothers of children with autism was true.”
So O’Donnell decided to film a short documentary about the program. As a result, the results, produced by late 1990s talk show veterans Hilary Estay McClaulin and Terrence Noonan, will be released on Hulu on April 22nd.
Adapt to a new life
While the documentary was filming, O’Donnell read Project 2025. This is a document created by the Heritage Foundation, which laid out the right-wing agenda of potential second Trump terminology. She believed in Trump when he said he would become a dictator on the first day, and when he said Project 2025 reflected something other than a specific plan for what he would do as president, she didn’t believe him.
“Tragic events in the world have always wiped out me emotionally,” she said. “I think it comes from watching the Vietnam War on TV at dinner as a little kid and seeing the excruciating graphic horror in the news.”
The first Trump terminology was debilitating for her.
“I was incredibly heavy and drank too much,” she said. “But there was a guardrail.”
In the final weeks of the campaign, she got ready. Just in case.
“I renewed my passport and renewed Clay’s passport,” she said. “My brother has his passports. All my cousins have passports. But I was never a traveler.”
The move to Ireland felt strange, but she was surprised at how much she liked it.
“I see my family and my very Irish childhood reflections and myself everywhere I see,” she said. “We are 100% Irish. Being a Catholic in Ireland is a huge part of my identity, and returning here feels like I’m going home in a way that is hard to explain or understand, even for me.”
She said people are extraordinarily friendly. When they approach her in public, they do so in a way that feels “1,000% different in the US.”
However, there was an unpleasant moment when Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheal Martin met with Trump in his oval office during the television appearance.
There, Brian Glenn, a voice reporter for the right-wing news outlet Real America and boyfriend of Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Green, asked Martin why O’Donnell was able to move there.
Mr. Martin seemed to flinch in his chair. However, he was able to avoid the question. Because Trump jumped in and humiliated O’Donnell himself, saying that he had scorned him.
O’Donnell then wrote to Martin a letter saying he was embarrassed to have become a topic of conversation during a serious meeting. He hasn’t responded.
It was yet another chapter in his nearly 20-year feud with Trump. But it seemed fair to ask, given O’Donnell’s ability to develop relationships with various pera, criminals and other infamous people.
“No,” she said.
