When it comes to her blossoming friendship with Lyle Menendez, Rosie O’Donnell leads with her heart.
The iconic comedian and TV host revealed she recently “went to visit my friend Lyle Menendez” on Thursday’s episode of SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live.
“You are something else,” host Andy Cohen joked, prompting O’Donnell to beam, “I follow my heart.”
“He said to me, ‘Will you come visit me in prison? I’m doing a presentation about making the prison more beautiful and why it’s helpful to inmates,’ and so I said yes. So, I went and visited him in prison,” O’Donnell explained, adding that Menendez’s speech was “phenomenal.”
The Emmy-winning Rosie O’Donnell Show host and The View co-host recently opened up about her newfound friendship with Menendez, who was convicted of the 1989 murder of his parents, Kitty and José Menendez, and sentenced to life without parole in 1994 alongside his brother, Erik Menendez.
Menendez planted the seed for their bond decades ago by writing O’Donnell a letter thanking her for her “support” during a 1996 appearance on Larry King Live. O’Donnell said she was able to empathize with the Menendez brothers’ defense that they were sexually abused by their father because she says she was abused at the hands of her own father. When interest in the Menendez case surged with the release of a 2022 documentary and 2024’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, O’Donnell finally responded, establishing a friendship.
O’Donnell stopped by Cohen’s show to discuss her new documentary Unleashing Hope: The Power of Service Dogs for Children with Autism, revealing that Lyle played a critical role in bringing her attention to the film’s subject.
O’Donnell said that after Menendez gave his speech, “This man came over to me and said, ‘Would you like to meet our dogs?’ and I’m like, ‘You can’t have dogs in prison,’ and he went and showed me these 10 Labrador retrievers sitting between these inmates legs doing all kinds of retrieving, and I couldn’t believe it.”
O’Donnell, who has a 12-year-old son named Clay with autism, was amazed to hear about a program run out of the facility where the Menendez brothers are currently incarcerated in San Diego that trains dogs to serve blind individuals, veterans, and “children with autism under the age of 12.” But she was “very hesitant” to submit her own application, “because I thought, ‘I don’t want them to do this because I’m a celebrity. I don’t want to cut the line for maybe a nonverbal kid who would really need it in a different way.”
“It was Lyle Menendez who convinced me that if you pass the application process, you are worthy of getting one of these dogs, and don’t turn it down before you see if your application is passed. Sure enough, our application was passed,” she revealed.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Rosie O’Donnell with ‘Sesame Street’ star Elmo on ‘The Rosie O’Donnell Show’
O’Donnell has been supportive of the movement to urge California lawmakers to consider granting the Menendez brothers a resentencing hearing, and even parole.
But she has also been forced to confront a set of legal problems closer to home, with her eldest daughter, Chelsea Belle O’Donnell, being sentenced to six years of probation in April following three consecutive arrests.
Rosie maintained a supportive stance toward her daughter, saying in a statement shared with Entertainment Weekly at the time, “I am very proud of her progress — we (her family) support and love her very much and are grateful for the opportunity she has to improve her health and find a way to live a life of sobriety.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
