In an upcoming book, Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View by Variety’s New York bureau chief, Ramin Setoodeh, the 56-year-old talked for the first time about the alleged sexual abuse she endured at the hands of her late father, Edward Joseph, who died in 2015.
“It started very young,” O’Donnell, 56, tells Setoodeh of the alleged abuse. “And then when my mother died, it sort of ended in a weird way, because then he was with these five children to take care of.
“On the whole, it’s not something I like to talk about. Of course, it changes everyone. Any child who is put in that position, especially by someone in the family, you feel completely powerless and stuck, because the person you would tell is the person doing it.”
This comes after she told Piers Morgan in an interview in 2012: “You get to be 50 years old, you can’t still be angry at what your father did in 1970…I have forgiven him.”
He died in 2015 at the age of 81.
15 thoughts on “American actress Rosie O’ Donnell says she was abused by her father as a child”