October 08 2025, 08:15 
Rosie O’Donnell says she believes her infamous fight with Elisabeth Hasselbeck on The View was “a set-up.”
O’Donnell opened up about the 2007 on-air blowout during an October 6 interview with comedian and radio host Joel Creasey while in Australia to promote her upcoming performance at the Sydney Opera House. Creasey broached the topic, initially referring to it as “the greatest TV moment of all time.”
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O’Donnell immediately knew the moment he was talking about.
“My Elisabeth Hasselbeck fight?” she said. “Of course. That’s what everyone loves. You know, I’m glad I could bring it to everyone.”
During her turbulent tenure on The View’s 2006–2007 season — which also kickstarted her longstanding feud with Donald Trump — O’Donnell’s frequent clashes with conservative co-host Hasselbeck over the Bush administration and the Iraq war reportedly brought the show some of its best ratings, but also drew negative coverage, often laced with homophobia, from right-wing media. Tensions between the two hosts came to a head during the “Hot Topics” segment of the show’s May 23, 2007, episode, with O’Donnell taking Hasselbeck to task for her perceived unwillingness to defend O’Donnell amid conservative mischaracterizations of her. O’Donnell abruptly left the show following the episode, and would not return until 2014.
In her interview with Creasey, O’Donnell let listeners in on what she was thinking during the infamous confrontation.
“I cannot believe that this woman, after all I did for her — because when I took that job, I made one commitment to myself, that I was not going to be her enemy. That I was going to meet her as a person,” she recalled. “And so, she came to my house, she swam in my pool, she brought her little kid, I took her kid to see Sesame Street Live, I took her to her first Broadway opening. Like, I bent over backwards for this woman, and here she was comin’ at me on national TV about whether or not I was patriotic.”
“It felt to me like I was on a basketball team of five women and one of them kept tripping me on my way to the hoop,” O’Donnell added.
Creasey asked whether O’Donnell had been aware that the footage of the fight on The View’s broadcast would show her and Hasselbeck in split screen.
“Of course not!” she said. “And, you know, our producer [was] not an on-the-fly kind of guy. He wasn’t, like, Mr. Let’s-go-to-a-split-screen. That was prepared. The whole thing, I think, was a set-up.”
@rickileetimjoel “It was a set up”.
Source: LGBTQ Nation