Rosie O’Donnell and the late Barbara Walters had their ups and downs from cohosting The View together and beyond.
“I knew her very well from Cindi Berger, who’s my publicist and who [was] also her publicist. Cindi would … go out to dinner and to a show with Barbara and I would tag along. So I knew her before I ever did The View,” O’Donnell, 67, told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published on Thursday, June 15. “Then Barbara and I got in a huge fight, and it was about the Donald Trump thing. He published an open letter to me in the [New York] Post. In it, he wrote that she’d called him ‘to apologize for my behavior.’ I was like, ‘Whoa.’”
The former president, 77, penned a public message to O’Donnell in January 2007, in which he alleged that Walters compared working with the actress to “living in hell,” and sent it via fax to her office at The View. (The late TV journalist never publicly addressed the validity of the supposed conversation prior to her death.)
The League of Their Own star — who cohosted the View alongside Walters from 2006 to 2007 and 2014 to 2015 — further explained that the two women got into a heated argument on the soundstage. “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,’” O’Donnell recalled. “It got loud, and people were in shock because nobody talked to her like that.”
The Sleepless in Seattle actress even made a comment about Walters’ daughter, Jacqueline Guber, at the time, which she has since regretted.
“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,” O’Donnell confessed to THR. “But I have apologized to her many times, and we got past it and saw each other [again].”
Several years later, the Fosters alum exclusively told Us Weekly where the former cohosts stood. “I think she’s a wonderful woman, and it’s hard to age in America, never mind if you’re internationally famous,” O’Donnell told Us in October 2019. “I’ll always love and respect her and I think she’s a great person.”
Walters died nearly three years later in December 2022 at the age of 93. After learning of the broadcasting legend’s passing, the former Rosie O’Donnell Show host paid her respects.
“Very sad to hear about Barbara Walters’ passing. Although 93, man, who wouldn’t take that? What a long and eventful, legendary life she had,” O’Donnell said in an Instagram video at the time. “Spoke to every prominent world leader in memory, interviewed everyone who’s anyone, and I was lucky enough to be in her orbit for a good many years. … We saw a lot of Broadway shows together, and whenever we’d go backstage, I’d try to help her over the steps backstage — and she would always smack my hand and tell me to leave her alone. She [knew] what she was doing I could tell you that.”
The Harriet the Spy star was subsequently invited to celebrate Walters’ legacy during a special episode of The View in January. O’Donnell, however, was unable to attend due to prior commitments.
