“It’s not my cello,” Rosie O’Donnell mentioned over a video name, sitting on a grey love seat in a grey hoodie and a pair of stylish brown glasses.
In New York, it was a Thursday morning. In Dublin, the place the actress, comic and former speak present host has been staying since mid-January, afternoon mild streamed by way of a close-by window. The cello got here with the rental.
A lot of celebrities talked in the course of the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections about shifting overseas if Donald J. Trump gained — amongst them, Barbra Streisand, Cher, and Amy Schumer.
Ms. O’Donnell truly went by way of with it.
“I by no means thought he would win once more,” she mentioned of President Trump, mentioning the tv clips she watched final 12 months of Kamala Harris, then the vp, showing at packed arenas in Pennsylvania and Michigan. “However I mentioned, ‘If he does, I’m going to maneuver,’ and my therapist mentioned, ‘Effectively, let’s make an actual plan.’”
It so occurs that Ms. O’Donnell had reservations about discussing all this with a reporter.
Her software for Irish citizenship has not but been authorised and he or she is nervous about doing something to jeopardize that. Technically, she and her youngest little one, Clay, who’s autistic and nonbinary, are nonetheless simply visiting the nation.
That being mentioned, Ms. O’Donnell has a documentary she desires to advertise — “Unleashing Hope: The Energy of Service Canine for Autism,” the story of a program through which incarcerated individuals practice service canine in jail, after which the canine are positioned with households like hers.
Ms. O’Donnell did seem on “The Late Late Present,” Eire’s equal of “The Tonight Present,” just a few weeks again. On it, she talked about her new life within the nation, hurled some insults at Mr. Trump and gave each indication that she can be remaining over there for the foreseeable future.
However a lot of her focus in the intervening time is on the documentary, which was impressed partly by, of all issues, her unlikely relationship with Lyle Menendez, the convicted assassin.
Discovering the Good in Individuals
Ms. O’Donnell, after all, has been feuding with Mr. Trump since 2006, when she joined “The View,” a chatfest created by the anchorwoman Barbara Walters.
On the present, in response to what she felt was Mr. Trump’s receiving overly optimistic protection for his remedy of an issue involving a Miss USA contestant, Ms. O’Donnell mocked Mr. Trump, flipping her hair over her face and delivering a withering impersonation whereas questioning his position as an ethical arbiter and a profitable businessman.
Mr. Trump threatened to sue “The View” and Ms. Walters personally. Ms. Walters obtained on the telephone with him to clean issues over. Quickly sufficient, Mr. Trump was showing throughout cable information calling Ms. O’Donnell “wacko” and “fats,” and he mentioned Ms. Walters personally instructed him that she regretted hiring Ms. O’Donnell.
The 12 months after, regardless of hovering rankings, Ms. O’Donnell left the present. However her feud with Mr. Trump by no means ended. She turned a fixture and a punchline within the grocery store tabloids, which she at all times suspected, however was unable to show, was the work of Mr. Trump and Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer who went to jail after pleading responsible to campaign-finance violations, tax fraud and financial institution fraud.
Whereas incarcerated on the federal correctional facility in Otisville, N.Y., Mr. Cohen acquired what he mentioned in a telephone interview on Friday was a letter from Ms. O’Donnell. “It was so heartwarming and compassionate I truly thought I used to be being punked,” he mentioned. She then visited Mr. Cohen in jail and was in contact with him within the days earlier than Mr. Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying enterprise information.
It might seem to be a case of politics making unusual bedfellows, nevertheless it was fairly typical conduct for Ms. O’Donnell, who has a behavior of discovering the great in controversial individuals.
Associates of hers embrace Lynndie England, the previous United States Military Reserve soldier who was prosecuted for mistreating detainees on the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad. Ms. O’Donnell reached out to Ms. England throughout her 2005 trial, believing that she was being was a scapegoat for the injustices of the Iraq conflict.
And there’s Actuality Winner, the previous navy contractor who pleaded responsible to felony transmission of nationwide protection data after leaking categorized paperwork about Russian interference within the 2016 election to The Intercept, a nonprofit information web site. Throughout the trial, Ms. O’Donnell obtained in contact with Ms. Winner’s mom, Billie Winner-Davis, and later had Ms. Winner on her podcast.
However no friendship of Ms. O’Donnell’s is extra shocking than the one she has with Lyle Menendez, who alongside along with his brother, Erik, was convicted of first diploma homicide and sentenced to life with out parole for the 1989 slaying of their dad and mom, Jose and Kitty Menendez.
Whereas the brothers have been on trial in 1996, Ms. O’Donnell gave an interview on “Larry King Dwell” through which she mentioned that she believed the brothers had been molested as kids and that the murders have been, indirectly, an act of self-defense.
Quickly after, she acquired a letter from Lyle Menendez.
In it, he thanked her for her assist and said his perception that she “knew” from a private place that what he was saying was true. Ms. O’Donnell did: She mentioned she and her siblings had been molested by their father.
However she didn’t attain out to him then.
“At that time, I had not ventured wherever close to this in my household or in my remedy,” she mentioned final week.
In 2022, after watching a documentary concerning the Menendez brothers, Ms. O’Donnell mentioned their case on TikTok, reiterating her perception that they have been sexual abuse survivors who killed their dad and mom out of a way of trauma and desperation.
Quickly after, she mentioned, Lyle Menendez’s spouse, Rebecca Sneed, reached out to her to see if she was enthusiastic about talking with him.
Their first dialog lasted two or three hours, Ms. O’Donnell mentioned.
“Then he began calling me regularly from the pill telephone factor they’ve,” she mentioned. “He would inform me about his life, what he’s been doing in jail and, for the primary time in my life, I felt protected sufficient to belief and be weak and love a straight man.”
A few of her mates expressed concern. “They have been like, ‘Ro, he’s a assassin,’” she mentioned.
She shrugged, then went to go to him in jail, the place she noticed scores of inmates with Labrador retrievers stationed silently at their toes.
Ms. O’Donnell requested Mr. Menendez how this might presumably be authorized and he instructed her a couple of program they needed to practice and place canine with blind, disabled veterans and autistic kids. He prompt Ms. O’Donnell get a canine for Clay by way of this system.
Ms. O’Donnell mentioned she felt uneasy at first. Clay is a extremely verbal little one and Ms. O’Donnell, conscious of her superstar standing, didn’t need to bounce in entrance of somebody who couldn’t operate with out a extremely skilled service canine. However Mr. Menendez instructed her to not fear: The canine have been distributed in keeping with want.
A 12 months later, she was authorised for a canine.
Ms. O’Donnell spent two weeks commuting each day to the jail, the place she was matched with Kuma, a black Labrador combine who had been skilled for a 12 months by Carlos Aguirre, an inmate doing time for armed theft. (Though the canine winds up working principally with the autistic little one, the intensive coaching takes place between the canine and an grownup.)
Kuma bonded immediately with Clay when she got here residence. “I observed the distinction in Clay instantly,” she mentioned. “I used to be shocked to search out out that every one the tales I heard from different moms of autistic kids have been true.”
So Ms. O’Donnell determined to movie a brief documentary about this system. The results of that, which was produced by Hilary Estey McLoughlin and Terrence Noonan — veterans of her late-Nineteen Nineties speak present — might be launched on Hulu on April 22.
Adjusting to a New Life
Whereas the documentary was filming, Ms. O’Donnell learn Challenge 2025, a doc created by the Heritage Basis that laid out a right-wing agenda for a possible second Trump time period. She believed Mr. Trump when he mentioned he can be a dictator on Day 1, and he or she didn’t consider him when he mentioned Challenge 2025 mirrored something apart from a particular plan for what he would do as president.
“World tragic occasions have at all times wiped me out emotionally,” she mentioned. “I consider it stemmed from watching the Vietnam Warfare on tv as slightly child throughout dinner and seeing unbearably graphic horror on the information.”
The primary Trump time period was debilitating for her.
“I used to be unbelievably heavy, I used to be consuming an excessive amount of,” she mentioned. “However there have been guardrails.”
Within the marketing campaign’s closing weeks, she made preparations. Simply in case.
“I obtained my passport renewed, I obtained Clay’s passport renewed,” she mentioned. “My brother has his passport. All my cousins have their passports. However I used to be by no means a traveler.”
So shifting to Eire felt unusual, although she has been pleasantly stunned by how a lot she likes it.
“I see reflections of myself on this nation all over the place I look, and reflections of my household and my very Irish childhood,” she mentioned. “We’re one hundred pc Irish. Being Irish Catholic was a really massive a part of my identification, and coming again right here does really feel like coming residence in a manner that’s exhausting to elucidate or perceive, even for me.”
The individuals, she mentioned, are unusually pleasant. Once they strategy her in public, they achieve this in a manner that feels “1,000 % completely different than in the USA.”
There was an uncomfortable second, nevertheless, when she watched Micheál Martin, the prime minister of Eire, meet with Mr. Trump on the Oval Workplace throughout a televised look.
There, Brian Glenn, a reporter from the right-wing information outlet Actual America’s Voice and the boyfriend of Consultant Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, requested Mr. Martin why he was permitting Ms. O’Donnell to maneuver there when all she might do was “deliver unhappiness” to the nation.
Mr. Martin appeared to wince in his chair. However he was in a position to keep away from the query as a result of Mr. Trump jumped in to say what a very good query that was and went about insulting Ms. O’Donnell himself.
Afterward, Ms. O’Donnell despatched Mr. Martin a letter saying how embarrassed she was to have turn out to be a subject of dialog throughout what ought to have been a critical assembly. He has not responded.
It was yet one more chapter in a feud with Mr. Trump that has been going for almost 20 years. However given Ms. O’Donnell’s seeming skill to forge relationships with numerous castaways, criminals and different infamous individuals, it appeared truthful to ask: May she see any good residing in him?
“None,” she mentioned.
