Rosie O'Donnell took to TikTok this week to declare herself "heartbroken" over the sexual assault allegations against former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), a politician she says she donated to, spoke with personally, and championed in public appearances. Her remedy for the disappointment? A blanket verdict: "Men suck."
The 64-year-old comedian, who relocated to Ireland with her teenage daughter just before President Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2025, posted a video Monday and a follow-up Wednesday processing the news that Swalwell had suspended his California gubernatorial campaign and resigned his congressional seat amid allegations that include a claim he drugged and raped a woman and sexually assaulted a staffer.
The spectacle is worth examining, not because O'Donnell's feelings matter more than anyone else's, but because her reaction lays bare a pattern that keeps repeating on the political left: invest enormous moral authority in a politician who talks a righteous game, then act stunned when the image collapses.
In her Monday video, as Breitbart News reported, O'Donnell opened with a question to her followers:
"Can we talk a little bit about Eric Swalwell?"
She then described her personal connection to the former congressman, saying she had spoken with him on the phone, donated money to him, and talked about him favorably in public appearances "years ago." She recalled admiring "his cute little family and two kids" and his willingness to berate colleagues over what she saw as their "moralist behavior."
Then came the turn. O'Donnell said she had written Swalwell a message after the allegations surfaced:
"And I wrote him. I wrote him a little message, and I said, 'You know, Bill Clinton broke my heart, and now you did, too.' You know the conclusion I've come to? Men suck."
The Clinton comparison is revealing. O'Donnell, a reliable progressive voice for decades, placed Swalwell in the same category as a former Democratic president whose own conduct with women became a defining scandal of the 1990s. That she still frames both episodes primarily as personal heartbreak, rather than as evidence of institutional failure within the party she has championed, says a great deal about how celebrity progressives process accountability.
O'Donnell did not stop at disappointment. In her Wednesday follow-up, she offered a broader theory about male behavior, telling viewers that men "physiologically" cannot "sort of control their sexual urges." She then circled back to Swalwell specifically:
"And boy, that Eric Swalwell. You know, teaches you not to believe in anyone."
She continued: "That's what it does for me. I don't believe in anyone." And then she sharpened the point further:
"People have images and they sell themselves as one thing, but they're not that thing. They have complications like all humans do, right? They have addictions, they have impulses, they have frontal lobe disorder, they have narcissism, they have a spoiled privileged upbringing that warps their perspective."
The irony is thick. Swalwell built a national profile precisely by casting himself as a moral authority, lecturing Republican colleagues from the House floor and cable news sets. O'Donnell, to her credit, identified the hypocrisy plainly:
"How could he sit there on his high horse and attack all these other congress people for their moral and ineptitude when he was doing what he was doing for all these years?"
That is the right question. But it is one that O'Donnell and many of Swalwell's other boosters might have asked sooner, or at least before donating and lending their platforms to his rise. As California Democrats have abandoned Swalwell in the wake of these allegations, the scramble to distance from him looks less like principle and more like damage control.
The facts behind O'Donnell's anguish are stark. Swalwell announced earlier this week that he was suspending his campaign for California governor and resigning from Congress. The allegations against him include a claim that he drugged and raped a woman and that he sexually assaulted one of his own staffers. The New York Post reported that Swalwell has denied the allegations.
The speed of the collapse is notable. Swalwell went from gubernatorial candidate to former congressman in a matter of days. His resignation from Congress alone would have been a significant story. Combined with the nature of the allegations, it marks one of the more dramatic downfalls of a sitting lawmaker in recent memory.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed she knew nothing about Swalwell's alleged sexual misconduct, a statement that raises its own set of questions about what Democratic leadership knew and when.
O'Donnell's commentary arrives from an unusual perch. She moved to Ireland just before President Trump took office in January 2025 and has said she is living there. Yet she has returned to the United States on at least two occasions since that move. Fox News reported that O'Donnell revealed she had quietly come back for two weeks to visit family and test whether it felt safe to return.
She had previously vowed not to come back to America while President Trump is in office. The gap between that pledge and her actual travel record is a small but telling example of the same phenomenon she now decries in Swalwell: people presenting "images that aren't real or are inaccurate."
Her final broadside in the TikTok videos swept well beyond Swalwell. O'Donnell told viewers she was "so angry about him" and "so disappointed and so sick of all politicians, because all they do is lie, 24/7, present images that aren't real or are inaccurate, and we fall for them." She also segued into attacks on President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, though the specifics of those remarks were not detailed in the reporting.
The pivot is instructive. Confronted with a scandal involving a Democrat she personally supported, O'Donnell moved quickly to spread the blame across "all politicians" and then redirect toward her preferred targets. That reflex, absorb the blow, universalize it, then point elsewhere, is a familiar one in progressive media circles. It spares the speaker from reckoning with why she invested so heavily in a figure whose conduct, if the allegations hold, was the opposite of everything he claimed to stand for.
The fallout from the Swalwell scandal continues to ripple through Washington. Rep. Cory Mills has rejected calls for his own resignation, insisting he will not share Swalwell's fate, a sign of how the former California congressman's name has already become shorthand for political disgrace.
The Washington Examiner noted O'Donnell's emotional reaction to the Swalwell allegations, placing it in the context of her broader pattern of public political commentary. Her TikTok confessionals have become a running feature of her post-American life in Ireland, a platform where personal grievance and political commentary blend freely.
O'Donnell is right that Swalwell's alleged conduct, if true, represents a profound betrayal of the public trust. She is right that his moralizing from the House floor looks grotesque in light of what has been alleged. And she is right that voters deserve better.
But the lesson she draws, "men suck", is not a political insight. It is an escape hatch. It avoids the harder question: why did so many people on the left elevate a man whose primary political skill was performative outrage, and why did none of them look more carefully before writing checks and singing his praises on camera?
Public figures who build careers on moral authority and public image face a particular kind of reckoning when the image cracks. Swalwell's fall is his own responsibility. But the infrastructure of celebrity endorsement, uncritical media coverage, and partisan loyalty that carried him upward deserves scrutiny, too.
O'Donnell says the experience taught her not to believe in anyone. A cheaper lesson would have been to believe less in politicians who spend more time performing virtue than practicing it.
