After losing 50 pounds, Rosie O’Donnell — who once vowed to never get plastic surgery — got a facelift.
In a deeply raw and emotional essay, the comedian and former talk show host opened up about battling an unthinkable amount of guilt and shame after undergoing cosmetic surgery earlier this year.
“I used to feel very strongly about facelifts,” she 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.”
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“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.”
O’Donnell said that when she started to do her own research, her 13-year-old child, Clay, strongly disagreed with the decision.
“Then my 13-year-old child found out. And it was not subtle. ‘You earned your wrinkles.’ Which — first of all — rude. But also… correct,” O’Donnell wrote. “Then clay said, ‘Young women look up to you,’ And finally — with strong effect — ‘I wouldn’t be able to respect you if you did it.’ And that one… landed. That’s a big statement from someone who still needs you to open jars.”
O’Donnell said she saw her younger self in Clay, a version of herself that was judging her own appearance.
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“It really threw me. I delayed the whole thing for months, just sitting with it, thinking,” she admitted. “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.”
“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 continued.
After months of back and forth, O’Donnell had a facelift in January.
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“I wanted a limit. 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.”
The comedian said “no one has noticed” the changes, not even her teen daughter.
“I went through a full existential feminist crisis, had my face and neck surgically altered, and the result is… zippo,” she wrote. “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.”
Despite the positive outcome, O’Donnell said she began struggling with an immense amount of guilt and deceit.
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“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?”
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O’Donnell said she feels “shameful” over her privileged place in this world, admitting that the facelift “cost more money than I have ever paid for a car.”
“The things I have – earned some say, but it’s the gross excess that wounds me,” she wrote.
“As I get ready for the last day of school with my youngest — the caboose here at 64 years old with a new lower face and neck, just happy to be alive, able to feel and choose and use my voice whenever I feel called to … For the girl I was, the woman I am, and all those joining my ranks. As we carry on in act 3, this is me.”
