Rosie O’Donnell has confirmed she is helping former nemesis Michael Cohen write a “spicy” tell-all about his years working for President Trump, as previously revealed by Page Six.
O’Donnell told the Daily Beast that she visited the then-jailed lawyer in prison for six hours and agreed to help with his memoir, an unlikely partnership Page Six first revealed at the beginning of March.
“It’s pretty spicy,” she promised of the book.
“He’s in the midst of writing it, and is nearly done writing it, and hopes that it’ll be out before the election,” she told the site.
O’Donnell said she struck up her unlikely friendship with Cohen as he was in the upstate Otisville federal prison serving a three-year sentence for lying to Congress and making illegal hush-money payments.
“I wrote him a letter the day that Trump got impeached,” O’Donnell, 58, told the Daily Beast, saying she “found his inmate number online.”
She forgave him for his attacks on her in a letter she says left him “so moved” he “started crying.”
In that letter, she told Cohen that she found it “mind-boggling” that he was “sitting in jail for doing exactly what the boss told you to do.”
“No matter how long it took you, you’ll be known and respected for that as much as any horror you’ve committed through him,” she wrote.
The letter sparked an unlikely friendship between the pair, with the former “View” host eventually visiting him in prison for six hours, she said in the interview published in part on Saturday.
“Michael and I talked a lot about how he got involved in Trump, how it’s a cult, and what role he played not only in Trump Inc.,” she told the site in an interview published Saturday.
The 53-year-old disbarred lawyer then discussed his impending tell-all about his years with Trump, with O’Donnell offering advice following her own success penning memoirs.
“He told me what chapters he was doing in his book, and on my way home, I was writing about what had happened between us, and I gave him my breakdown of things that should be in chapters.
“I said, ‘You should tell this story as a chapter, you should tell this story as a chapter,'” she said of the advice she gave.
Despite their troubled relationship in the past, O’Donnell said she always felt she could relate to Cohen because “he always looked to me like someone from my neighborhood.”
“He grew up on Long Island like I did, he’s a few years younger, and he reminds me of my brothers. I look at this guy and go, ‘How did he fall under the spell of that charlatan?’” she said.
Cohen last month appeared set to leave prison amid the coronavirus pandemic — a move later rescinded by a judge who says he needs to “accept the consequences of his criminal convictions for serious crimes that had far reaching institutional harms.”
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