Rosie O'Donnell is offering her review of Elisabeth Hasselbeck's return to The View as a guest co-host, and it wasn't pretty.
O'Donnell, 60, posted a TikTok video on Thursday and explained that she was prepared to sit and watch her former (current?) nemesis/ex-crush return to the daytime talk show but, to her surprise, actually missed it. Hasselbeck's episode aired Wednesday, but O'Donnell managed to find the episode and offered some thoughts.
"And I watched it, from yesterday," O'Donnell said. "And I remembered why I don't want to watch it with her anymore. Her little Post-it notes. I don't know. Listen. It's strange. Yeah. Um, hope you're having a good day. And if you saw that yesterday, hope you recovered."
O'Donnell joined The View in September 2006 but left in May 2007, just days after her and Hasselbeck's infamous on-air fight, which started over the war in Iraq but quickly spilled into personal issues between the two. Hasselbeck left the show in 2013.
O'Donnell would return in the fall of 2014 for a brief stint and, following the announcement of O'Donnell's return, Hasselbeck, by that point a Fox News star, phoned in to Fox & Friends and offered a blistering opinion of the network's decision to bring back O'Donnell.
"What could ruin a vacation more than to hear news like this?" Hasselbeck said at the time. "Talk about not securing the border. Here comes to The View the very woman who spit in the face of our military, spit in the face of her own network and really in the face of a person who stood by her and had civilized debates for the time that she was there."
Just a couple months prior to O'Donnell's return announcement, she and Hasselbeck seemed cordial with one another during Barbara Walters' reunion show on The View, but the feud had no end in sight.
Fast forward to 2019, O'Donnell told Variety she had a "little bit of a crush" on Hasselbeck, which might have explained their complicated relationship during their short tenure at the ABC show.
"I think there were underlying lesbian undertones on both parts," O'Donnell claimed at the time. "I think this is something that will hurt her if you write it. She was the MVP of a Division 1 softball team for two years that won the finals. There are not many, in my life, girls with such athletic talent on sports teams that are traditionally male that aren't at least a little bit gay."
But the "crush" was, by no means, sexual.
"There was a little bit of a crush," O’Donnell said. "But not that I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to support, raise, elevate her, like she was the freshman star shortstop and I was the captain of the team."
"I was going to Scottie Pippen her," she continued, referring to the NBA star's relationship with Michael Jordan while the two were on the Chicago Bulls. "If I was Jordan, I was going to give her the ball and let her shoot. But it was in no way sexualized."
Hasselbeck didn't appreciate the comments, calling it "disturbing" and that she "immediately started praying," which only created more fodder for O'Donnell.
Later this fall, O'Donnell can take solace in that the panelists for The View are now set in stone. Alyssa Farah Griffin and Ana Navarro recently inked deals as permanent co-hosts, joining Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines at the table.
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