Rosie O’Donnell posted a lengthy poem to Substack this week chronicling a messy fallout with her adopted 27-year-old daughter, who has petitioned to drop the comedian’s last name in favor of her birth mother’s maiden name.
The poem, called “my child chelsea,” addresses the family feud, which has generated headlines after O’Donnell reportedly cut her daughter Chelsea out of her $80 million estate only days before leaving the U.S. for Ireland.
Chelsea bit back by instigating a last name change to “Neuens” instead of “O’Donnell,” part of a bid to affiliate with her birth mother Deanna.
“she wants her privacy/ i am her mom/ the story is out there/ people judge and ask,” O’Donnell’s 30-stanza poem began. “why didn’t u try more …/u should have done something else …/I would never have …/if she were mine …/”
O’Donnell’s on-and-off relationship with her daughter has been in the public eye since Chelsea ran away from home as a young teen. Although the two seemed to reconnect in 2018 after Chelsea gave birth to her first daughter, things began to fall apart after Chelsea was arrested in 2024 on felony child neglect and drug possession charges. She was then arrested two other times for similar charges over the next two months.
O’Donnell acknowledged it publicly at the time, saying Chelsea has “struggled with drug addiction for a decade.”
“every adoption story is complicated/ nuance and subtext/ a primal wound/ sometimes doesn’t heal,” O’Donnell continues.
The successful comedian fled the U.S. for Ireland after Donald Trump was re-elected. The president has been in a two-decade long feud with O’Donnell, and has previously made derogatory comments about her.
The former host of The View has adopted five children, and reportedly cut Chelsea out of two separate trusts. One included her $27 million life insurance policy. O’Donnell’s exact reasoning is unknown, but news of the potential estrangement comes only days after Chelsea was sentenced to six years of probation following her consecutive drug arrests.
O’Donnell has publicly said that her daughter is “mentally ill.”
She “has been in and out of hospitals most of her life. She is very sick,” the actress said in 2017. “She is not capable of truth or reason.”
When Chelsea was only 17 she went missing from O’Donnell’s New York home but was later found safe by authorities. She was sent to Wisconsin to live with her birth mother. The mother-daughter duo didn’t reconnect until years later.
O’Donnell expressed empathy for Chelsea in the Substack poem, saying “she wants a private life/ she deserves one too/ her journey/ made public by a series of bad decisions/ on everyones part/ when she was a young teen.”
She added that “some things are hard to come back from,” and claimed that her daughter gave her permission to post the poem.
The poem also addresses Chelsea’s interest in a name change, which O’Donnell says “doesn’t make sense to me” but adds “its not about me/ i am here for her/ she’s not here for me.”
O’Donnell also writes about a court hearing a few months ago, when a Wisconsin judge told Chelsea he was proud that she had completed treatment, and encouraged her to tell herself the same.
“the story made my knees weak/ to think of my child/ parenting herself-honoring herself/ made me weep,” wrote O’Donnell.
The comedian added that when her daughter called her Sunday to announce she got a high school diploma “ten years too late,” O’Donnell began to tear up.
“im happy we were not on face time/ as I start to quietly cry/ remembering her school anxiety/ how hard it was back then,” she writes.
O’Donnell even added she wishes she could “delete” her fame for her daughter.
“She is doing so well now/ in spite of the tabloid fodder,” she adds. “She’s working on herself/ aren’t we all.”
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