Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi have listed their $20 million Cotswolds farmhouse for sale. The couple who moved to the English countryside in November 2024 — just days after Donald Trump won re-election — reportedly found rural British life "boring" and "frustrating."
Turns out, making a political statement with your zip code works better when you actually like the zip code.
DeGeneres, 68, had gone all-in on the expatriate act. In a BBC interview with broadcaster Richard Bacon shortly after arriving, she gushed about her new homeland. "Everything here is just better — the way animals are treated, people are polite," she said. She told audiences she saw snow for the first time in her life. She brought chickens. Portia brought her horses. They briefly had sheep.
But the $27 million Montecito mansion DeGeneres quietly purchased with de Rossi told a different story. The couple who sold their previous Montecito estate in August 2024 — before the grand British relocation — bought right back into the same California neighborhood. Sources told Fox News the move back to Southern California was "temporary." The couple just wanted to "spend the winter in Montecito" and planned to return to England in the spring.
Spring came and went. The Cotswolds farmhouse hit the market. De Rossi, the "Arrested Development" actress, reportedly never adapted to the change in scenery. The social life that sustains celebrity existence in Los Angeles doesn't exactly replicate in a village where the big weekly event is the farmers' market.
Meanwhile, Rosie O'Donnell's Irish exile has developed its own cracks. The 63-year-old comedian moved to Dublin with her teenage daughter Clay in January 2025, just before Trump's second inauguration. She applied for Irish citizenship in October 2025. She told Chris Cuomo on SiriusXM's "Cuomo Mornings" that she'd secretly returned to the U.S. for two weeks without telling anyone. "I just went to see my family," she said. "I wanted to see how hard it would be for me to get in and out of the country."
Her assessment of the homeland she left behind was characteristically dramatic. "The energy that I felt while in the United States was — it was scary," O'Donnell said. "There's a feeling that something is really wrong."
So scary, in fact, that she attended the Tony Awards in New York on June 7, revealed her new facelift on the red carpet, and announced a 12-show Off-Broadway engagement of her solo show "Common Knowledge" at the Daryl Roth Theatre starting July 22 and running through August 8. The show, directed by Gabriel Barre, covers her move to Dublin, cultural shifts, family life, and politics. She's already performed it in Dublin, Sydney, Glasgow, Melbourne, and the Edinburgh Fringe.
For someone who finds America's "energy" terrifying, O'Donnell sure booked a lot of American stage time.
The Trump-O'Donnell feud goes back 20 years to her days on "The View." In July 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social: "Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her." White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded to news of O'Donnell's quiet return with four words: "What great news for America!"
O'Donnell pushed back on the citizenship threat, noting the obvious constitutional barrier. "He can't do that because it's against the Constitution," she said. "The only way you're allowed to take away someone's citizenship is if they renounce it themselves." She's correct — the 14th Amendment protects natural-born citizens, and O'Donnell was born in Commack, New York.
As Pat Gray noted on BlazeTV, the celebrity escape plan hasn't quite gone as advertised. The Blaze reported that both women are "finding reasons to return to the United States despite fleeing after Trump's election." That's a polite way of putting it.
The pattern is worth noting. The departure announcements got breathless media coverage. The returns are happening in whispers — a quiet real estate transaction here, a secret two-week visit there, a convenient Broadway booking that just happens to require several weeks on American soil. Even the framing has shifted. O'Donnell isn't "coming home." She's "visiting family." DeGeneres isn't "moving back." The California mansion is "temporary."
Every exile needs a story about why they left. Apparently, they also need a story about why coming back doesn't count as coming back.
