Comedian Rosie O’Donnell and Michelle Rounds, who married in 2012, have finalized the divorce for which O’Donnell filed in February of last year.
People magazine said Wednesday that a representative for the Commack-born O’Donnell, who turned 54 on March 21, confirmed that a final court appearance is scheduled for Thursday in Manhattan. “The divorce is finalized; this is just a formality for the paperwork to be submitted,” the representative said.
The couple settled negotiations in October, agreeing to “joint legal custody” of their daughter Dakota, born in January 2013.
O’Donnell in summer 2011 met Rounds, then an executive search consultant, at a Starbucks. “I thought she was a 28-year-old heterosexual girl, because that’s what she looked like to me. And she’s a 40-year-old gay woman,” O’Donnell told Cynthia McFadden on “Nightline” that October. “My gaydar was way off!” That December they announced they had become engaged, and the couple were wed in a private ceremony in New York on June 9, 2012.
Former “The View” co-host O’Donnell had married Kelli Carpenter in February 2004 during a window in which San Francisco conducted same-sex marriages. The California Supreme Court annulled their and thousands of other marriages that August. The couple broke up in 2007.
O’Donnell, whose recent TV appearances include a recurring role on the Freeform (formerly ABC Family) series “The Fosters,” has four other children: Parker Jaren, whom she adopted in 1995; Chelsea Belle, adopted in 1997; Blake Christopher, adopted with Carpenter in 1999; and Vivienne Rose, 10, born to Carpenter through artificial insemination.
