Rosie O’Donnell and her ex, Michelle Rounds, have reportedly split due to their completely different parenting styles, and now Rounds says she will walk away from their pre-nuptial agreement if O’Donnell agrees to let her have full custody of their daughter, Dakota.
The couple, who married in 2012, have both admitted that there were stresses within the marriage, with O’Donnell saying that they were fighting while she was having a hard time on The View. The talk show host left the popular daytime series earlier this year after only five months, with her exit following a heart attack.
“Stress is a major contributing factor to heart disease and heart attacks. You can’t really minimize it. I’m having a lot of stressful situations in my family life at the moment and having stressful situations in my work environment, so something had to give,” O’Donnell said.
Rounds said in a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight that O’Donnell is more of a hands-off parent, and that she feels Dakota would be in a much more protective environment if she had full custody. A rep for Rosie said that Rounds is just using Dakota for her own gain.
“It makes me feel sad that it has come to this — that Rosie and her publicist feel like they need to do this character assassination. I just want my child to have the best possible environment to grow up in, a normal life. Right now she’s got 24/7 nannies over there at Rosie’s house. I don’t want my child to have a 24/7 nanny. She leaves the baby overnight with nannies, she has the monitor in the nanny’s room,” Rounds said in the interview.
Rounds also says she doesn’t care about Rosie’s money, and that all she wants is custody.
“I made my first million before the age of 39, that was before I met Rosie. I don’t need Rosie’s money. I don’t want Rosie’s money. Nothing was in my name. The prenup money means nothing to me.”