Ellen DeGeneres sold her Montecito estate in August 2024, bought a farmhouse in the Cotswolds, moved her horses to England, and told a British broadcaster she woke up the day after the election, saw the texts, and decided she was going to make a life for herself abroad. Rosie O'Donnell packed up her youngest child Clay and relocated to Ireland. Neither of them went quietly. They told everyone who would listen they were dramatically fleeing the country due to Donald Trump's return to the White House.
Twenty months later, DeGeneres just bought a $27 million mansion in Montecito, California. I guess America under President Trump's guidance isn't so bad after all Ellen!
The celebrity escape plan has a recurring structural problem: the people who execute it keep coming back. DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi — married since 2008 — are now telling sources the California purchase is a "temporary winter retreat" and that they plan to return to England in the spring. Which raises a question nobody in entertainment journalism seems willing to ask: who buys a $27 million winter retreat?
DeGeneres had given a whole interview to broadcaster Richard Bacon about the beauty of English country life. "It's absolutely beautiful... a simpler way of life. It's clean," she said. The Cotswolds farmhouse had chickens. They briefly had sheep. She saw snow for the first time. It was all very charming and very permanent-sounding.
Then California started calling. Sources close to the couple say they're "missing the California weather and horse scene." DeGeneres hasn't been frequently seen in the Cotswolds recently. She reportedly sod her farm there, findign that way of life too tough compared to California's. The simpler way of life, it turns out, is simpler than she wanted.
Comedian Rosie O'Donnell's version is slightly different but lands in the same place. She flew back to New York in February to meet her grandson, and then returned in June for the Tony Awards. After spending a week back home, O'Donnell began plotting her return to America. She is slated to cover for Jimmy Kimmel this summer on his late night show. I guess O'Donnell saw that life in America isn't that bad --even for people who call the President "an a-hole and a con man."
This is a pattern with a long history. DeGeneres and O'Donnell certainly aren't the only celebrities caught up in their TDS. Miley Cyrus posted on Instagram in 2016 declaring she would move if Trump won. She's still here. Lena Dunham told fans she planned to move to Canada. She is also still here. Same with Cher, she never left. The celebrity emigration threat has a perfect track record of not happening, and on the rare occasion someone actually follows through, the follow-through has an expiration date measured in months.
The whole exercise has always had an unspoken assumption baked into it: that America would notice the absence and feel the loss. That the country would be diminished by the departure of its famous residents. That was the leverage — "You'll miss us when we're gone."
Twenty months of nobody missing them is apparently enough to reconsider the arrangement.
