Rosie O’Donnell has shut down a rumor that she is returning to the U.S. to compete on Dancing with the Stars after an AI-generated picture said differently.
On Monday, the 64-year-old comedian shared an AI-generated picture on Instagram that showed her in a sparkling green dress with extremely curly hair posing like a dancer in the DWTS ballroom. The text on the picture claims that O’Donnell is making her debut on this fall’s season 35 of ABC’s hit competition series, reading: “She returns to the U.S. in an epic comeback!”
O’Donnell quipped about the fake poster: “This made me laugh. Reminds me to never get a perm!!! Completely untrue but funny.”
The former daytime talk show host left America to move to Ireland in January 2025 with her youngest child, Clay O’Donnell, in part due to her decades-long feud with President Donald Trump.
She said in a TikTok addressing her decision in March 2025: “It's not easy to move to another country, and we really felt as a family this was the safest and best thing for us to do. I feel healthier, I'm sleeping better without the stress and anxiety over what was happening politically in the country.”
O’Donnell continued: “I was never someone who thought I would move to another country,” she continued. “You know, I'm happy. Clay is happy. I miss my other kids. I miss my friends. I miss many things about life there at home and I'm trying to find a home here in this beautiful country.
“When it is safe for all citizens to have equal rights there in America, that's when we will consider coming back,” she added.
In the wake of Trump’s return to the White House, he threatened to revoke O’Donnell’s citizenship several times due to her criticism of his administration, and even described her as a “threat to humanity.”
The mother-of-five revealed in September that she missed her daughter’s graduation from the University of Delaware earlier in the year due to her feud with Trump. Weeks later, she confirmed that she was applying for Irish citizenship.
When approached for comment at the time, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Independent: “What great news for America!”
O’Donnell secretly visited the U.S. in February of this year and later told Chris Cuomo on the SiriusXM show Cuomo Mornings that she returned to see her children, but that she did not regret her decision to leave at all.
“I'm very happy that I'm not in the midst of it there, because the energy that I felt while I was in the United States was — if I can use the most simple word I can think of — it was scary,” she said on the radio show. “There's a feeling that something is really wrong, and nobody is doing anything about it."
