The unexpected friendship of Rosie O’Donnell with the murderer condemned Lyle Menendez is still strong.
“The view” Alum exclusively the page six they still discuss “about two or three times a week” while he and his brother, Erik Menendez, continue to serve their sorrows for life for the murder of their parents in 1989.
O’Donnell started talking to Menendez in 2022 after watching a documentary on the brothers and sisters.
Their case has been renovated to a meticulous examination following a Netflix documentary alleging that the brothers have been sexually abused by their father for years.
O’Donnell, 63, hopes that they will soon be released.
“I’m sure in my mind,” she tells us. “I must be.”
She adds: “I think this is the only way you can love and take care of someone who serves life without parole, it is to have an endless hope and to believe in their ability to get out of this really inhuman sentence.”
During one of O’Donnell’s visits with Lyle, she noticed many prisoners seated with Golden Retriever dogs.
Lyle explained that dogs were trained by incarcerated men to help the autistic children and suggested that O’Donnell obtains a dog for his youngest child, Clay, who has autism.
A year later, Clay, 12, who uses pronouns, was twinned with a mixture of black Labrador named Kuma.
The star of “Harriet The Spy” says that the changes in the clay were simply extraordinary.
“The drawings of people with hands and bloody knives have all stopped,” she shares. “Laughter has returned, the brightness in their eyes, the ability to go out in restaurants, the ability to remain present and not to disappear in themselves, generally because Kuma comes and pushes them.”
O’Donnell was so impressed by the program, she decided to film a short documentary on this subject.
O’Donnell, as many in the community of autism, is furious against the recent speech by the secretary of the Department of Health and Social Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. where he alleged that children diagnosed with autism, “will never pay taxes. They will never hold a job.
“I hope I will never have to see him in person because I don’t think I would be able to contain my disgust,” she said.
“Hanging hope: the power of service dogs for autistic children” is in trouble on Hulu.
