Rosie O’Donnell Reveals Shocking Truth Behind Her Infamous Fight With Elisabeth Hasselbeck on ‘The View’

Rosie O’Donnell is revisiting a painful moment in her career.

The TV personality, 63, recalled her explosive May 2007 fight with her former The View cohost Elizabeth Hasselbeck during a recent appearance on the Ricki-Lee, Tim & Joel podcast.

O’Donnell and Hasselbeck, 48, famously got into a heated argument about the Iraq War, and were put on a split screen as they went at it with each other.

Podcast host Joel Creasey asked the former The Rosie Show host if she knew the split screen was happening, to which she responded, “Of course not!”

“I looked up and 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,” the comedian claimed. “So, the whole thing, I think, was a setup.”

The Emmy award winner also told Creasey, 35, that she tried to form a real bond with Hasslebeck behind the scenes, despite them having different political views.

“When I took that job, 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,” O’Donnell remarked.

“I bent over backward for this woman, and here she was coming at me on national TV about whether or not I was patriotic,” O’Donnell added. “It felt to me like I was on a basketball team of five women, and one of them kept tripping me on my way to the hoop.”

O’Donnell was supposed to exit the daytime talk show in June 2007, but she did not return to the series after the fight.