Comedienne and former The View co-host Rosie O’Donnell is now admitting to having had a facelift despite calling the plastic surgery procedure a “betrayal” of feminism in the past.
Before the outspoken, left-wing comedienne lost 50 pounds she vowed to fans that she would not get a facelift to get rid of her sagging, excess skin. But after the weight loss, she did it anyway. And now she is calling it her “secret shame.”
“I used to feel very strongly about facelifts,” O’Donnell recently wrote on Substack. “Not casually — morally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never – ever. I thought it was a betrayal. Of feminism. Of aging. Of our team of women worldwide. And then I lost 50 pounds.”
She went on to explain that “It wasn’t wrinkles— it was gravity. I’d look in the mirror and think, this isn’t aging, this is melting with intention. I tried to be evolved about it. And say things like, ‘This is natural. This is earned.’ And then… ‘umm how earned does it have to look?’ There’s a point where acceptance starts to feel like lying.”
In her editorial, she claimed that her 13-year-old son, Clay, argued against the facelift and told her the wrinkles were “earned.” He even told her he wouldn’t respect her if she got the facelift.
While her son’s strong condemnation made her delay the procedure, she ultimately decided to go ahead with it anyway.
“And then I had this quiet realization: if I’m teaching clay anything, it can’t be that my body belongs to an idea either. Even a good idea. Even feminism,” she said of when she finally decided to go through with it.
“Because that’s still not freedom— that’s just a different authority telling you what you’re allowed to do with your own face,” she exclaimed.
I wanted to still be me, just… less haunted,” she wrote. “And I do look like me — a slightly more well-rested, emotionally stable version of me,” said the comedienne so famous for her unhinged, politically motivated social media posts.
After she got the lift, she claimed no one really even noticed.
“I went through a full existential feminist crisis, had my face and neck surgically altered, and the result is… zippo,” she said. “Which honestly is the best possible outcome. I didn’t disappear, I didn’t become someone else— I just stopped arguing with the mirror. And maybe that’s enough. Or at the very least…it’s what a lower deep plane face lift looks like when it minds its own business.”
Yet, she soon began feeling guilty over the procedure.
“I have never liked secrets and part of my desire to show myself is to come clean. But who do I owe that truth to? Is it mine to keep?”
She also admitted that the financial excess of it was also something that gives her a bit of angst because of her “shameful” privilege.
“The things I have – earned some say, but it’s the gross excess that wounds me,” she admitted.
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