Rosie Will Probably Leave 'The View'

Rosie O'Donnell — quite rightly, I believe — has had enough of Barbara Walters and "The View." I am told that she is not likely to renew her one-year contract when it ends in June and will leave the crazy talk show after boosting its ratings higher than ever.

Sources say that Rosie feels that the backstage antics at "The View" "are completely dysfunctional." O'Donnell, who's got plenty of money and lots of outside interests, simply doesn't need to be there. I am told that her contract was for "one school year" and that ends in June.

But ABC might feel differently, given that O'Donnell has made "The View" bigger than ever. It's conceivable that the network brass will prevail — either buying out or retiring Walters and convincing O'Donnell to stay as the show's moderator.

Ironically, oddsmakers would have guessed that Elizabeth Hasselbeck, Rosie's political and ideological opposite, would have been the one to cause O'Donnell the most pain at the show. But it turns out that Walters, the woman who chose O'Donnell for the job in the first place, surfaced as her backstage enemy.

The tension between Walters and O'Donnell surfaced yesterday, first when Page Six reported that the pair had a fight about the Donald Trump-Miss USA saga just before the show went on air Monday morning.

Then later yesterday, a letter from Trump to Rosie was leaked, in which Trump told O'Donnell that Walters, essentially, had betrayed her to Trump and acted disloyally.



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