Rosie O'Donnell Opens Up About Infamous Clash With Elisabeth Hasselbeck On 'The View'—And Why She Thinks It Was A 'Setup'

It was one of the most viral moments of the 2000s before that term even existed: The now infamous 2007 on-air shouting match between Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck on The View.

The pair had been hired for the panel for their outspokenly opposing political viewpoints. And in May of 2007, that opposition came to verbal blows over the Iraq War.

The debate erupted into a nasty on-air feud that O'Donnell recently told the hosts of the Australian podcast Ricki-Lee, Tim & Joel she believes was a "set-up" for ratings.

These days liberals and conservatives alike are mostly on the same page that the Iraq War was a colossal mistake and a shameful error, but that was definitely not the consensus at the time.

And in May 2007 the long simmering disagreements between Republican Hasselbeck and Democrat O'Donnell finally boiled over.

What began as a debate on the merits of the war quickly became nasty, with Hasselbeck essentially accusing O'Donnell of being unpatriotic and treasonous for not supporting the war and then-President Bush.

- YouTubeyoutu.be

At the time, at least, it was The View's standard operating procedure to not allow discussions to become so nasty. But in this case, producers decided to let it ride, even cutting to a split-screen so viewers could watch the two women go at each other.

It caused a firestorm that placed O'Donnell directly in the line of fire of every conservative commentator on TV, and precipitated her early departure from The View.

And now, O'Donnell says she is convinced The View producers did it on purpose. She told the podcast hosts:

"You know our producer is not an on-the-fly kind of guy, he wasn’t mister like, ‘Let’s go to the split-screen.’ That was prepared. So, the whole thing, I think, was a setup."

She added that the blow-up with Hasselbeck was only the peak of a long-standing pattern of the show's main producer trying to inject as much GOP propaganda into the show as possible.

She explained:

"The producer was a man on the #1 women’s voices show, Bill Geddie."

"He was not a great guy, if you ask me. He would give Elisabeth Hasselbeck the Republican talking points every day before the show started."

But almost worse, O'Donnell said, was the betrayal the fight constituted on the part of Hasselbeck, with whom O'Donnell had strained to create a generous and friendly working relationship.

"When I took that job [on ‘The View’], 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."

"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."

"I bent over backwards for this woman, and here she was coming at me on national TV about whether or not I was patriotic."

On social media, people were firmly on O'Donnell's side.

As for Hasselbeck, she took to Instagram to respond to O'Donnell's comments in the way conservative women do best: Crying on-camera while calling O'Donnell—whom she accused in 2019 of being sexually obsessed with her—a liar and implying she's mentally ill.