Rosie O'Donnell Says Lyle Menendez 'Was Instrumental in Helping Me Heal a Lot of Stuff': 'One of My Closest Friends' (Exclusive)

Rosie O’Donnell knows her relationship with convicted killer Lyle Menendez is unexpected — and a little “weird” — but the comedian says, “I consider him one of my closest friends.”

O’Donnell, 63, and Lyle, 57, first connected in 1996, after Lyle and his brother Eric were convicted for the murder of their parents. O’Donnell had publicly expressed support for the brothers, who claimed their parents had abused them, and Lyle had written her a letter. O’Donnell remembers telling friend Barbara Walters, with whom she starred on The View at the time, about the letter. “Rosie, he’s a manipulator,” Walters told her. “Don’t respond to him. He’s a manipulator and he’s a murderer.”

She followed Walters’ advice, but years later, after more evidence of abuse was revealed, O’Donnell posted a TikTok in support of the brothers, and Lyle reached out again. She took a phone call from him from prison: “We talked for many hours that night. I came to know him in a really personal and emotional way. And for two years, we spoke many times a week. He’s one of my closest friends.”

O’Donnell, who has opened up about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her own late father when she was a child, tells PEOPLE she was “in a bad place” when she and Lyle connected and that “he was really instrumental in helping me heal a lot of stuff that I had with men and a lot of stuff that I needed to work through.”

It was also amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and she was struggling to parent her child, Clay, now 12, who is autistic and who identifies as non-binary. At the time, O’Donnell says, Clay was still sleeping in their bed, and would overhear her conversations with Lyle. “Clay was listening and would talk sometimes and Lyle would be like, ‘Hey, Clay, what’s going on?'”

One day, Clay had a friend at the house when O’Donnell was on the phone with Lyle, and Clay announced, “That’s my mommy’s friend, Lyle Menendez. He killed his mother and father. But they were very, very, very mean to him. We’re lucky we don’t have mean parents.” O’Donnell laughs at the memory: “I was like, ‘Holy moly!'”

Lyle eventually invited O’Donnell to visit him in prison, and while she was there, she learned about a program run by the Guide Dogs of America in which inmates helped train future guide dogs for placement with people who are blind, veterans suffering PTSD, and with families who have a child with autism.

O’Donnell applied for the program, but nearly backed out because she was worried about leaving Clay for the 10-day training required for parents.

“I had never been away from Clay for 10 days,” she says. “I was very, very afraid. But Lyle convinced me to go. I remember sitting in my house in Santa Monica with the loaded car, and I was on the phone with Lyle and I said, ‘I don’t think I can do it.’ And he said to me, ‘You can do it, and Clay’s going to be better for it, and you are going to be better for it. Be brave and go, Ro. Just f—— go.’ And if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have went.”

O’Donnell and Clay welcomed their guide dog Kuma in February 2024, and “it changed everything,” says O’Donnell, who produced a documentary about their experience with GDA, Unleashing Hope: The Power of Service Dogs for Children with Autism, which is available to stream on Hulu April 22.

“There was a darkness and kind of a loneliness that is gone, and I credit the dog with that.”