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*Rosie O’Donnell has revealed that she was sexually abused by her late father during her youth.
In an upcoming book, “Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View” by Ramin Setoodeh, O’Donnell opens up for the first time about the sexual abuse she endured at the hands of her father, Edward Joseph, who died in 2015.
“It started very young,” O’Donnell told Setoodeh of the alleged abuse. “And then when my mother died, it sort of ended in a weird way, because then he was with these five children to take care of. On the whole, it’s not something I like to talk about. Of course, it changes everyone. Any child who is put in that position, especially by someone in the family, you feel completely powerless and stuck, because the person you would tell is the person doing it.”
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Rosie previously discussed her mental health on The Howard Stern Show in November, saying: “I have major depressive disorder — luckily, I’m medicated.” She also admitted to experiencing “suicide ideation” years after being molested by her father.
“It means you think about it,” she explained. “You never make the plan necessarily of how you’re going to do it.”
She then acknowledged her body-image struggles were connected to the sexual abuse she experienced as a child.
“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.”
In January 2012, Rosie told CNN’s Piers Morgan that her father “had a lot of problems to deal with” and it caused great strain on their relationship.
“He had his own issues and demons,” she said. “He had a very tough childhood. He had an alcoholic, abusive father and never really got the help that I think every person needs when they have lived through that as a child.”
Her father died of cancer at age 81.
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