“It’s not my cello,” said Rosie O’donnell on a video call, sitting on a gray seat in a gray sweatshirt and a pair of chic brown glasses.
In New York, it was a Thursday morning. In Dublin, where the actress, the comedian and former Talk Show conductor remains from mid -January, the afternoon light was broadcast through a nearby window. The cello arrived with the rental.
Many celebrities spoke during the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections on the transfer abroad if Donald J. Trump won – among these, Barbra Streisand, Cher and Amy Schumer.
Mrs. O’Donnell actually succeeded.
“I never thought he would win again,” said President Trump, raising the television clips that he watched Kamala Harris last year, then vice -president, appearing at the Arenas packed in Pennsylvania and Michigan. “But I said:” If you do, I will move “and my therapist said:” Well, let’s do a real plan. “
So it happens that Mrs. O’Donnell had reservations to discuss all this with a journalist.
His demand for Irish citizenship has not yet been approved and is worried about doing anything to jeopardize him. Technically, she and her youngest child, Clay, who are autistic and non -tracks, are still visiting the country.
Having said that, Mrs. O’donnell has a documentary that wants to promote: “Surping hope: the power of service dogs for children with autism”, the story of a program in which imprisoned people train dogs in prison, after which dogs are placed with families like his.
Mrs. O’Donnell appeared in “The Late Late Show”, the equivalent of Ireland of “The Tonight Show”, a few weeks ago. On it, he spoke of his new life in the country, launched some insults to Mr. Trump and gave every indication that would remain there for the near future.
But much of his attention is currently on the documentary, which has been inspired in part by all things, by his unlikely relationship with Lyle Mendez, the convicted killer.
Find good in people
Mrs. O’Donnell, of course, made a feud with Mr. Trump since 2006, when he joined “The View”, a chatfest created by the Ancecase Barbara Walters.
On the show, in response to what he believed that Mr. Trump receives excessively positive coverage for his treatment of a dispute that involves a competitor of Miss USA, Mrs. O’Donnell derived Mr. Trump, throwing his hair on his face and offering a commeating with a commensation as he questioned his role as a moral referee and a successful businessman.
Trump threatened to sue “The View” and Mrs. Walters personally. Mrs. Walters rose to the phone with him to smooth out things. Soon early, Mr. Trump was appearing in all the cable news by calling Mrs. O’Donnell “Wacko” and “Fat”, and said Mrs. Walters personally told him that she regretted having hired Mrs. O’Donnell.
The following year, despite the surgered assessments, Mrs. O’donnell left the show. But his feud with Mr. Trump is never over. She became a fixed appointment and a final joke in the supermarket tabloids, which she always suspected, but she was unable to demonstrate, it was the work of Mr. Trump and Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and repairer who went to prison after declaring themselves guilty of violations of the countryside, tax fraud and bank fraud.
As he was imprisoned at the Federal Correction structure of Otisville, New York, Cohen received what he said in a telephone interview on Friday was a letter from Mrs. O’Donnell. “He was so moving and compassionate that I actually thought I was punk,” he said. He then visited Mr. Cohen in prison and was in contact with him in the days before Mr. Trump had been sentenced for 34 counts for falsification of the company registers.
It may seem like a policy case that creates strange bedmates, but was a rather typical behavior for Mrs. O’Donnell, who has the habit of finding good in controversial people.
His friends include Lynndie England, a former soldier of the United States army reserve who was pursued to mistreat in the prisoners of Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mrs. O’Donnell contacted Mrs. England during her 2005 trial, believing she is transformed into a scapegoat for the injustices of the war in Iraq.
And there is the winner of reality, the former military contractor who declared himself guilty of criminal transmission of information on national defense after leaching documents classified on Russian interference in the 2016 elections to interception, a non -profit news site. During the trial, Mrs. O’Donnell got in touch with the mother of the winning lady, Billie Winner-Davis, and later had the winning lady on her podcast.
But no friendship of Mrs. O’Donnell is more surprising than what she has with Lyle Mendez, who together with her brother, Erik, was sentenced for first -degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without conditional freedom for the killing of 1989 of their parents, Jose and Kitty Mendez.
While the brothers were on trial in 1996, Mrs. O’Donnell gave an interview with “Larry King Live” in which she said that she believed that the brothers had been harassed by children and that the murders were, in some way, an act of self -defense.
Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from Lyle Mendez.
In it, he thanked her for his support and declared his belief that he “knew” from a personal place that what he was saying was true. Mrs. O’Donnell did: she said that she and her brothers had been harassed by her father.
But then he did not reach him.
“At that point, I hadn’t ventured anywhere close to this in my family or in my therapy,” he said last week.
In 2022, after seeing a documentary on the Mendez brothers, Mrs. O’Donnell discussed their case on Tiktok, reaffirming her belief that they survived the sexual abuse that killed their parents for a sense of trauma and despair.
Shortly after, he said, Lyle Mendez’s wife, Rebecca Sneed, lengthened her hand to see if she was interested in talking to him.
Their first conversation lasted two or three hours, said Mrs. O’Donnell.
“Then he started calling me regularly from the thing about the phone of the tablet they have,” he said. “He would have told me about his life, of what he did 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 his friends have expressed concern. “They were like” ro, it’s a killer, “he said.
He squeezed in his back, then went to find him in prison, where he saw dozens of prisoners with Labrador Retriever stationed in silence at their feet.
Mrs. O’Donnell asked Mr. Mendez how this could be legal and told her about a program that had to train and position dogs with blind veterans, disabled people and autistic children, who is managed by the Guide Dogs of America program. He suggested Mrs. O’Donnell to get a dog for clay through the program.
Mrs. O’Donnell said that at the beginning she felt uncomfortable. Clay is a highly verbal child and Mrs. O’Donnell, aware of her celebrity status, did not want to jump in front of someone who could not work without a highly trained service dog. But Mr. Mendez told her not to worry: the dogs were distributed according to need.
A year later, she was approved for a dog.
Mrs. O’Donnell spent two weeks of pendulum for the prison, where she was combined with Kuma, a mix of black labrador who had been trained for a year by Carlos Aguirre, a prisoner who does time for the armed robbery. (Although the dog ends up working mainly with the autistic child, intensive training takes place between the dog and an adult.)
Kuma joined the clay instantly when she returned home. “I immediately noticed the difference in the clay,” he said. “I was shocked to discover that all the stories I heard from other mothers of autistic children were true.”
So Mrs. O’Donnell decided to film a short documentary on the program. The result of this, produced by Hilary Estey McLoughlin and Terence Noonan-Veterani of his 90s talk show-will be released on Hulu on April 22nd.
Adapt to a new life
While the documentary was shot, Mrs. O’Donnell read the 2025 project, a document created by the Heritage Foundation that presented a right -wing agenda for a potential second term of Trump. He believed Mr. Trump when he said he would be a dictator on the first day, and she didn’t believe him when he said that project 2025 reflected something different from a specific plan for what he would do as president.
“The tragic events of the world have always swept me away emotionally,” he said. “I think it derives from watching the Vietnam war on television as a child during dinner and seeing an unbearable graphic graphic horror on the news.”
Trump’s first term was debilitating for her.
“I was incredibly heavy, I was drinking too much,” he said. “But there were guardrail.”
In the last weeks of the campaign, he has made preparations. In the event that.
“I renewed my passport, I renewed the Clay passport,” he said. “My brother has his passport. All my cousins have a passport. But I’ve never been a traveler.”
So moving to Ireland felt strange, even if she was pleasantly surprised by how much she likes.
“I see reflections of myself in this country wherever I look and reflections of my family and my very Irish childhood,” he said. “We are 100 % in Irish. Being Irish Catholics has been a very large part of my identity, and returning here wants to go home in a difficult way to explain or understand, even for me.”
People, they said, are unusually friendly. When they approach her in public, they do it in a way that looks “1,000 percent different from the United States”.
There was an uncomfortable moment, however, when he saw Micheál Martin, the prime minister of Ireland, to meet with Mr. Trump at the oval office during a television apparition.
There, Brian Glenn, a right -wing news reporter Real America’s Voice and the boyfriend of the representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, asked Mr. Martin because he was allowing Mrs. O’Donnell to move there when everything he could do was “to bring unhappy” to the country.
Mr. Martin seemed to jump on his chair. But he was able to avoid the question because Mr. Trump jumped inside to say what a good question was and made Mrs. O’Donnell himself insult.
Subsequently, Mrs. O’Donnell sent Mr. Martin a letter saying how embarrassed she was to have become a topic of conversation during what should have been a serious encounter. He didn’t answer.
It was yet another chapter of a feud with Mr. Trump who has been going for almost 20 years. But given the apparent ability of Mrs. O’Donnell to forge relationships with various patarlicas, criminals and other notorious people, it seemed right to ask: could it see good to reside in him?
“Nobody,” he said.