Rosie O'Donnell Reveals Why She Decided to Get a Secret Facelift: 'I Wanted to Be Truthful'

Rosie O'Donnell is speaking candidly about a personal decision she kept private for months.

While attending the Tony Awards in New York City on Sunday, June 7, the comedian addressed her recent facelift and explained why she ultimately chose to share the news rather than keep it to herself.

“Authenticity is the goal in these days and times, and people are lying about everything all day to the American public,” she told E! News on the red carpet. “It’s very depressing to me and unsettling, and I think all that matters is truth and love, and so I wanted to be truthful and say all the complicated emotions I had about it.”

Before moving forward with the procedure, O'Donnell revealed that one family member strongly disagreed with the decision.

“My little autistic 13-year-old said to me, ‘If you do it, I would not be able to respect you ever again,'” she recalled. “And that put me off it for a few months, but then when I went and did it in January, I came home 10 days later, and they never noticed.”

Despite those concerns, the television star eventually went through with the surgery earlier this year.

“I just wanted to say, ‘This is what I did, and here’s the doctor, and if you want to,'” she shared. “But it’s very expensive — it’s more expensive than any car I ever bought, but I can’t drive around in my face.”

O'Donnell also explained that significant weight loss contributed to her choice.

“I’m on Mounjaro over the last three years, I have diabetes too, and I lost over 50 pounds, and that was responsible for a lot of the extra skin that I had around my face,” she told the outlet.

She added that she has no plans to undergo additional cosmetic procedures, explaining that the facelift addressed the concerns she wanted to fix, including loose skin and facial lines.

As OK! previously reported, O'Donnell recently discussed the procedure in a personal poem titled Decisions, which she shared on her Substack on May 25.

In the piece, she admitted she was surprised by how little attention the change received after undergoing the facelift earlier this year.

“I didn’t disappear,” she wrote, noting that “no one has noticed” the change and that her previous appearance still felt present to her.

“My privileged place in this world,” she continued. “And that feels almost shameful to me. The things I have — earned some say, but [it's] the gross excess that wounds me.”

For years, O'Donnell said she viewed cosmetic enhancements very differently.

“I thought it was a betrayal of feminism. Of aging. Of our team of women worldwide. And then I lost 50 pounds…” she wrote.

The topic was also recently discussed on The View, where Joy Behar shared details about O'Donnell's feelings surrounding the decision.

Behar called O’Donnell her "friend" and explained that O'Donnell "was racked with guilt over her decision" to go under the knife since she "used to be against women getting work done on their faces because she thought it was a betrayal against feminism."

According to Behar, O'Donnell pursued the procedure because she "wanted to look more rested and less haunted."

Co-host Ana Navarro then revealed she reached out to O'Donnell directly.

"I said to her, 'Being a feminist means doing something that makes you feel empowered and happy,'" she recalled.

O'Donnell later responded with a text message explaining her motivation: "I wanted to do this because I was looking sad when I'm feeling so happy."