It sounds like Barbara Walters was no fan of working with Rosie O’Donnell on “The View,” and she wasn’t afraid to make that fact known. Journalist Ramin Setoodeh went behind the scenes of all the drama in the 2019 book “Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View,” and claimed that Walters was so against having O’Donnell back that she threatened to leave the show — as would then-producer Bill Geddie — if O’Donnell returned. Ouch. The book claimed that Walters was enjoying lunch with Brian Frons, then president of ABC Daytime, when she told him, “If you re-sign Rosie to this show, Bill and I are going to quit.”
Read Related Also: Britney Spears Vs. Victor Wembanyama Wasn't On Our 2023 Bingo Card. Here's The Drama
O’Donnell recounted her own issues with Walters in 2023, a few months after Walters’ death. She explained to The Hollywood Reporter they met years before “The View” and had a mutual friend in common, but fell out majorly at the show over one very divisive individual. “Barbara and I got in a huge fight, and it was about the Donald Trump thing. He published an open letter to me in the [New York] Post. In it, he wrote that she’d called him ‘to apologize for my behavior.’ I was like, ‘Whoa,'” O’Donnell said. As the open letter mentioned Walters, that caused the ladies to get into an argument about it while at work on “The View.” That, it’s fair to say, didn’t go down well.
