Rosie O’Donnell reflects on her complicated friendship with Ellen DeGeneres

By Dan Heching, CNN

(CNN) — Known for her standup as well as her Emmy-winning late-’90s daytime talk show, Rosie O’Donnell is not one to beat around the bush. And when it comes to her history with Ellen DeGeneres – which includes both a friendship as well as a rivalry – O’Donnell isn’t holding back.

In a new interview published Thursday in The Hollywood Reporter, O’Donnell looked back on how her career intersected with that of DeGeneres, noting that the latter “came out first” on O’Donnell’s chat show back in 1996.

“I had said to her, ‘I don’t want you to be out there alone,’ because the reason she was doing publicity was ‘The Puppy Episode,’ (the title of the “Ellen” sitcom episode in which DeGeneres’ on-air alter ego came out), this big surprise episode of her sitcom,” O’Donnell recalled. “And it had been rumored that’s what she was doing, coming out, but nobody really knew.”

The “League of Their Own” star went on to say she had known DeGeneres “for years doing stand-up and as young entertainers in Hollywood.”

“Me, Melissa, k.d. and Ellen, we all would go to parties together,” O’Donnell said of her, DeGeneres, k.d. Lang and Melissa Etheridge.

While she termed their previous bond as “a good relationship” and that they “were friends” who “supported each other” in the past, O’Donnell told the outlet this week that she and DeGeneres have also had “weirdness,” saying, “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 then referred to an appearance DeGeneres once made on “Larry King Live,” where she said she didn’t know O’Donnell and that the pair weren’t friends when King asked her about O’Donnell.

“I was watching TV in bed with my wife going, ‘Did she just say that?’” O’Donnell recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. “It would never occur to me to say ‘I don’t know her’ about somebody whose babies I held when they were born. It wouldn’t be in my lexicon of choices to ever say. When she was in a perplexing situation and people were saying things about her, I said, ‘Let me stand next to you and say that I’m Lebanese, too.’ When it was a downward media time for me, she didn’t do anything.”

O’Donnell went on to share that she and DeGeneres had reconnected recently via text, in which O’Donnell said DeGeneres wrote to her that she was sorry and didn’t remember the exchange with King.

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