Rosie O’Donnell: Fight With Elisabeth Hasselbeck on ‘The View’ Was a ‘Setup’

Rosie O’Donnell has claimed that her infamous 2007 on-air clash with co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck on “The View” was orchestrated in advance by the show’s producers.

Appearing on the “Ricki-Lee, Tim and Joel” podcast, O’Donnell said she now believes the heated exchange, which centered on the Iraq war and aired in May 2007, was deliberately staged. She pointed to the show’s use of a split-screen format during the segment as evidence that it had been planned.

“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,” O’Donnell said, referring to the show’s late executive producer Bill Geddie, who died in 2023. “So, the whole thing, I think, was a setup.”