Rosie O’Donnell Got a Facelift After Swearing She Never Would: ‘It Was a Betrayal of Feminism’

Rosie O’Donnell had a change of heart about something she once felt “morally” against.

The 64-year-old shared in a Sunday, May 25, Substack essay that she went through a lower deep plane facelift in January. The A League of Their Own star also posted an excerpt from the deeply personal essay on her Instagram.

O’Donnell revealed that the bold choice came after dropping 50 pounds on the prescription drug Mounjaro.

“I used to feel very strongly about facelifts. Not casually — morally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never — ever,” she wrote. “I thought it was a betrayal. Of feminism. Of aging. Of our team of women worldwide. And then I lost 50 pounds…”

The former Rosie O’Donnell Show host said the rapid weight loss left her face with extra wrinkles, giving her a “haunted” look. She tried to sit with it at first, telling herself, “This is natural. This is earned.”

“Umm how earned does it have to look?” she recalled thinking.

As she began looking into procedures, the Riding the Bus with My Sister star said her 13-year-old child, Clay, wasn’t on board.

“Young women look up to you,” Clay told her. “I wouldn’t be able to respect you if you did it.”

Those words stung. The SMILF actress said Clay’s pushback echoed her own “morally rigid” beliefs and made her shelve the idea for months.

Then something shifted. “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,” she wrote. “Because that’s still not freedom — that’s just a different authority telling you what you’re allowed to do with your own face.”

O’Donnell found a doctor she “trusted,” someone who had worked on friends who all “still looked like themselves.”

The Now and Then star described her new look as “a slightly more well-rested emotionally stable version of me” — and ironically, “not one person” in her life has caught on.

“Not a friend, not a stranger, not even people who owe me compliments,” she joked. “I went through a full existential feminist crisis, had my face and neck surgically altered, and the result is… zippo.”

“Which honestly is the best possible outcome,” O’Donnell wrote. “I didn’t disappear, I didn’t become someone else — I just stopped arguing with the mirror. And maybe that’s enough.”