A 2022 clip is circulating again, but it leaves out what happened next
A clip of Rosie O’Donnell saying Ellen DeGeneres once hurt her feelings so badly she never got over it is making the rounds on social media again, framed as fresh news. It isn’t. O’Donnell told the story in September 2022, and a lot has happened between the two comedians since, including a moment last year that the viral version leaves out entirely.
So what actually happened between two of television’s most famous gay women, whose careers ran side by side before they drifted apart? Here is the full story, in their own words.
Rosie O’Donnell’s Ellen Comments Resurface
The remarks come from the Sept. 15, 2022 episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, where O’Donnell appeared alongside The Office star Brian Baumgartner, Fox News reported. A fan asked a simple question: why had O’Donnell never been a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show during its long run?
“We had a little bit of a weird thing,” O’Donnell answered, in the clip Bravo posted.
She explained that after her own talk show ended and DeGeneres’s was starting, Larry King asked DeGeneres about her on the air. As O’Donnell remembered it, King said: “Whatever happened to Rosie O’Donnell? Her show went down the tubes. She came out as a lesbian and disappeared!” according to Entertainment Tonight.
“And Ellen said, and I’m quoting, ‘I don’t know Rosie. We’re not friends.’” O’Donnell told Cohen, ET reported.
She said she was watching from bed with her first wife, Kelli Carpenter, and could hardly believe what she had heard.
“It hurt my feelings, like a baby, and I never really got over it,” she said.
O’Donnell added that she had in fact been invited onto DeGeneres’s show once, toward the end of its run, to promote her Showtime series SMILF. She asked to bring someone along. “I wanted to bring someone with me because I thought it might be a little less awkward,” she said. The show declined, and she never went.
She closed the subject on a generous note. “I wish her all good things in her life and that she should be well,” O’Donnell said, according to ET.
That line is missing from the version now circulating, which describes O’Donnell as having blasted DeGeneres.
What Ellen Said on Larry King Live
The interview O’Donnell described aired on Larry King Live on Sept. 7, 2004, when King asked DeGeneres why O’Donnell’s show had been canceled, Out reported. The words DeGeneres used, as reported from that broadcast, were slightly softer than O’Donnell’s memory of them.
“I don’t really know Rosie that well. I mean, I’ve spoken to her, but we’re not really friends,” DeGeneres told King, according to Us Weekly.
Later in the same interview, DeGeneres described her public role in a way that set her apart from O’Donnell. “I don’t really think I’m controversial. I think what I did was controversial,” she told King, according to Out. “I’m a comedian who happens to be gay.”
Either way, what stung O’Donnell was the distance it implied. She returned to that night in a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“I don’t know if it’s jealousy, competition, or the fact that she said a mean thing about me once that really hurt my feelings,” O’Donnell said, Out reported. “It would never occur to me to say ‘I don’t know her’ about somebody whose babies I held when they were born.”
She also contrasted it with how she had treated DeGeneres. “When it was a downward media time for me, she didn’t do anything,” she said.
The 2022 clip did reach DeGeneres. Afterward, O’Donnell told The Hollywood Reporter that DeGeneres had reached out.
“She texted me a few weeks ago checking in, seeing how I’m doing,” O’Donnell said at the time, Us Weekly reported. O’Donnell said she asked DeGeneres how she was coping with life after television.
Two Talk Show Pioneers
Part of why the rift still interests people is how closely the two women’s careers ran side by side.
The Rosie O’Donnell Show ran from 1996 to 2002. In its first year, with rumors swirling about whether the lead character of DeGeneres’s sitcom Ellen would come out, DeGeneres was a guest.
“Let’s straighten the whole thing out. Tell me what’s gonna happen with Ellen Morgan,” O’Donnell said, according to Out.
DeGeneres kept a straight face. “We do find out that the character is Lebanese,” she said. O’Donnell played along: “I’m a big fan of Casey Kasem. Maybe I’m Lebanese!” Out recounted.
O’Donnell has said she did not want DeGeneres to be out there alone, Out noted, and she hinted at the time that she was part of the LGBTQ+ community too, years before she came out publicly, ET reported. DeGeneres came out in The Puppy Episode of Ellen, which aired in April 1997.
O’Donnell came out publicly in 2002, during a speech at a charity benefit, PinkNews reported.
DeGeneres’s coming out was costly at first. Speaking on her own show in April 2022, 25 years after her famous coming-out episode, she looked back on it.
“When I came out, people warned me that it was going to ruin my career, and they were right for a while,” DeGeneres said, Fox News reported. “Actually, for exactly three years, I lost my career. But look at me now.”
The Ellen DeGeneres Show went on to run for 19 seasons, ending in May 2022. Its final years were overshadowed by former staffers’ allegations of a toxic workplace, according to ET.
Neighbors in Europe, Not in Touch
Today the two live closer to each other than they have in years, and they still are not close. Both left the United States after the 2024 presidential election. O’Donnell moved to Ireland on Jan. 15, 2025, while DeGeneres and her wife, Portia de Rossi, settled in the English countryside in late 2024, Parade reported.
O’Donnell has said she moved after reading Project 2025 and after Donald Trump won the election, as she told Jimmy Kimmel Live viewers. She admitted DeGeneres’s move surprised her.
“I’ve never really known Ellen to say anything political in her life, so I was surprised to read that she left because of President Trump,” O’Donnell told Us Weekly in April 2025, Parade reported.
In the same interview she described where things stood. “We’re not really in each other’s worlds, and it’s been kind of awkward but you know what? I wish her the best,” she said.
She was clear that there was no grudge match. “I don’t want to fight against another gay woman. It’s not like we’re tenaciously opposed to each other. We’re just very different people,” O’Donnell said, according to Parade. She added that “there’s enough room in the world for all of the gay comedians.”
Ellen’s ‘Good for You’ After Trump’s Threat
The moment the viral post skips came in July 2025. On July 12, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was giving serious thought to taking away O’Donnell’s citizenship.
“She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her,” Trump wrote, Fox News reported.
O’Donnell answered him in a string of posts on Instagram and TikTok. A day after Trump’s post, DeGeneres reposted both the threat and O’Donnell’s response on her own Instagram, with a short caption.
“Good for you @rosie,” DeGeneres wrote, Out reported.
A representative for O’Donnell told Fox News Digital: “Rosie is thankful for her support,” Fox reported.
It was a small gesture, but a public one, from the woman who had once told a national audience the two were not friends. O’Donnell’s citizenship was never in real danger: she was born in Commack, New York, and many legal experts say the government cannot unilaterally revoke a natural-born American’s citizenship, Fox News noted.
Where Things Stand Now
DeGeneres’s show of support did not erase the old hurt. Two months later, on the Sept. 7, 2025 episode of Mamamia’s No Filter podcast, O’Donnell spoke about the friendship again.
“Instead of deciding to stand next to me and hold my hand, which is what I did to her, she did the opposite,” she said, Us Weekly reported. She called it one of the most painful things that ever happened to her, in show business or in life.
“I have photos of her holding my newborn babies,” O’Donnell said on the podcast, according to Us Weekly. “I knew her for 30 years.”
She also addressed the idea that she keeps bringing it up. “I don’t rehash it for pleasure. I rehash it because our careers have taken sort of parallel, interwoven paths,” she said.
That may be the clearest way to understand the story. This is less a feud than an unresolved friendship between two women whose lives keep running in parallel, from daytime TV to coming out to leaving the country.
O’Donnell, for her part, is back in the spotlight. In August 2026 she guest-hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live, her first time behind a talk show desk since her own daytime show, according to the show.
Featured image: composite of photos by David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, and Toglenn, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Composite licensed CC BY-SA 4.0