Rosie O’Donnell had t-shirts made at the height of her feud with Ellen DeGeneres

Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell have one of the longest-standing “celebsian” feuds—one that O’Donnell apparently commemorated with novelty t-shirts. The pair were apparently close friends, and O’Donnell even helped with DeGeneres’ public coming out. “It was a good relationship. We were friends. We supported each other. Which is why when she came on my show, I said, ‘Let me not have you standing there by yourself. Let’s get a joke in there,’” O’Donnell recalls in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “It became a big thing.”

The media being what it was in the ’90s (and still is, given that the situation is still being discussed today) “everybody was asking me, ‘What do you think about Ellen?’ It became a strange, ‘There can’t be two lesbians in this town,’ kind of a thing,” O’Donnell says. “Then we each had success and went separate ways.”

“She texted me a few weeks ago checking in, seeing how I’m doing, and I asked her how she’s surviving not being on TV,” the A League Of Our Own star revealed. “It’s a big transition. But we’ve had our weirdness in our relationship. I don’t know if it’s jealousy, competition or the fact that she said a mean thing about me once that really hurt my feelings.”

O’Donnell has spoken on multiple occasions about their falling out, which occurred after DeGeneres said “I don’t know Rosie. We’re not friends” during an appearance on Larry King Live. DeGeneres apparently texted to say “I’m really sorry and I don’t remember that” after seeing O’Donnell talk about it on Watch What Happens Live.

“I remembered it so well, I had T-shirts printed and I gave them to my staff that said ‘I don’t know Rosie. We’re not friends,’” O’Donnell says now. “I have a picture of her holding [my then-infant son] Parker. I know her mother. I could identify her brother without her in the room. I knew her for so many years. It just felt like I don’t trust this person to be in my world.”

Clearly, the text message did not entirely smooth over the hard feelings. “It would never occur to me to say ‘I don’t know her’ about somebody whose babies I held when they were born. It wouldn’t be in my lexicon of choices to ever say,” she tells THR. “When she was in a perplexing situation and people were saying things about her, I said, ‘Let me stand next to you and say that I’m Lebanese, too.’ When it was a downward media time for me, she didn’t do anything.”

And that’s part of the reason O’Donnell never appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “She used the same staff from my show—Jim Paratore, Andy Lassner. So that was odd. It was very similar to my show,” she says. “And then I asked to go on because of something I was promoting, and she said no. And I remember going, ‘Seriously?’ After she said no that one time, whenever they would ask [me to appear] on the show, I would say no.” Feud status: still on, baby.