Rosie O’Donnell Had Multiple HR Complaints Filed Against Her At ‘The View’
A new book, Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View, is spilling all the tea on the women who have been a part of The View, and the latest news from the highly anticipated release reveals that Rosie O’Donnell terrorized people on the set of the ABC show.
According to Radar Online, O’Donnell made threats and cruel jokes to her colleagues to the point where several hosts and producers filed complaints with human resources against her.
The author of the book, Ramin Setoodeh, writes that many people commented on O’Donnell during interviews for the book.
At one point, O’Donnell set her sights on show director Mark Gentile in an attempt to get him removed from the show. Gentile filed an HR complaint against her and refused to be in the studio if she was around.
According to the book, he “wouldn’t walk into the studio unless it had been cleared of Rosie.”
The former Rosie O’Donnell Show host also had it out for co-host and show founder Barbara Walters. It got so bad that Walters “refused to return to the show unless Rosie was gone.”
“If you re-sign Rosie to this show, Bill [Geddie] and I are going to quit,” Walters told ABC Daytime President Brian Frons in 2007, according to People.
“Rosie was running around telling the staff that Barbara Walters at 77 was ‘much too old to be on TV,'” Setoodeh wrote.
Walters had picked O’Donnell to be on the show in 2006 to replace Star Jones. But the comedian’s antics on set and on camera had gained the show negative attention, so Walters wanted her out.
The next season, the 57-year-old co-host was out, though she briefly returned in 2014 after Walters left the show.
The show’s co-creator, Bill Geddie, apparently also found O’Donnell so difficult to work with that he “took a temporary leave of absence to get away from her.”
The A League of Their Own actress has been in the news for her battle with co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, as The Inquisitr reported. O’Donnell revealed that she had a crush on Hasselbeck, and Hasselbeck shot back that she found O’Donnell’s comments disturbing.
Rosie O’Donnell to Elisabeth Hasselbeck: I’m sorry my non-sexual crush scared you https://t.co/RfiRmIEDdw pic.twitter.com/YMek7h0fh9
— Page Six (@PageSix) March 26, 2019
O’Donnell also went after her former co-host Whoopi Goldberg.
“Whoopi Goldberg was as mean as anyone has ever been on television to me, personally — while I was sitting there,” O’Donnell said in the book, according to People. “Worse than Fox News. The worst experience I’ve ever had on live television was interacting with her.”
