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Rosie O’Donnellis opening up about a traumatic childhood experience.
Details of the alleged sexual abuse appear in a chapter aboutThe Rosie O’Donnell Show, which aired from 1996 to 2002.
A rep for O’Donnell declined to comment.
During an appearance onThe Howard Stern Showin November,O’Donnell discussed her own mental health— “I have major depressive disorder — luckily, I’m medicated,” she said — and admitted to experiencing “suicide ideation” years after her alleged sexual abuse.
Sonja Flemming/CBS
“It means you think about it,” she explained. “You never make the plan necessarily of how you’re going to do it.”
She then connected the sexual abuse she experienced as a child with her body-image struggles.
“I think it’s what your body does to protect you if you’re a kid who’s sexually abused, which I was,” she said. “You kind of disconnect from your body, you dissociate. You don’t pay attention to it. You don’t want to love it, because it’s kind of betrayed you in some way.”
O’Donnell, who shares four children with ex-wife Kelli Carpenter-O’Donnell — sons Parker, 23, and Blake, 19, and daughters Vivienne, 16, andChelsea, 21 — also opened up about the sudden death of ex-wife Michelle Rounds, whodiedof apparent suicide in September 2017 at age 46.
“You knew Michelle, and that was a very troubled situation,” O’Donnell, who is now engaged to girlfriend Elizabeth Rooney, told hostHoward Stern.
O’Donnell toldExtrain October 2017 that Rounds’ death was“very sad, very tragic”and addressed her ex-wife’s hospitalization in September 2015 for an apparent overdose, alluding to it as a suicide attempt.
“It was not the first time,” she said. “There was a time in September 2015. You think love has the answer. But mental illness has no say.”
source: people.com
