Rosie O’Donnell scored good ratings and warm reviews during a one-week stint guest-hosting ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” last month. But ABC felt less enthusiastic about one of the skits she had prepared about President Trump.
ABC executives made her delay a monologue skit mocking Mr. Trump, she said on a recent podcast, because it was preparing to sue his administration.
ABC has been ensnared for months in an escalating conflict with the Federal Communications Commission, which initiated an unexpected early review of ABC’s coveted local broadcast licenses. In the middle of Ms. O’Donnell’s week on air, ABC’s parent company, Disney, took the rare step of suing the agency, accusing it of violating the First Amendment with that review.
The former talk-show host said on “The Jann Arden Podcast” that she had planned to close her opening-night monologue by singing “Donnie Boy,” an anti-Trump spoof of the Irish ballad “Danny Boy.”
But shortly before taping on Aug. 17, she said, “the network called and said, ‘We don’t want you to do it.’ Now I had five minutes to prepare a different ending to the monologue.” Ms. O’Donnell said she discovered why the next morning. On Aug. 18, Disney filed its suit.
“The next day when I woke up, I went, ‘Now I understand,’” Ms. O’Donnell said on the podcast. “Had they said to me, ‘There’s something coming down corporately tomorrow, and we would prefer you waited,’ I just would have waited without being so, ‘What’s happening! What’s happening!’”
ABC declined to comment. Ms. O’Donnell performed the skit on the show later in the week.
She said on the podcast that a segment involving victims of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein also got nixed.
But the discussion about the segment happened with Mr. Kimmel, not ABC, and he suggested that she not do it, said Cindi Berger, a representative for Ms. O’Donnell.
“Rosie had a conversation with Jimmy before she guest-hosted for him,” Ms. Berger said in an email. “She shared her idea about the Epstein survivors, and he told her it would be best for her to do it” online only.
A representative for Mr. Kimmel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this month, Ms. O’Donnell posted a video to her personal Instagram account of a group of women she described as Epstein survivors, collectively singing Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”
Ms. O’Donnell was notably restrained in lashing out against her longtime nemesis, Mr. Trump, while she filled in for Mr. Kimmel. The two have traded public insults since 2006.
Ms. O’Donnell said on the podcast that her restraint was intentional and that she felt compelled to “deliver” for Mr. Kimmel after he “stuck his neck out” in selecting her as a guest host.
“I made an active choice to approach Trump the way that I did, and not aggressively like a pit bull, which scares some people,” she said. “I didn’t have my glasses on on purpose. I had contacts in, and I think it reminded people, ‘Oh, remember, we like her.’”
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