It’s been seven years since Roseanne Barr was abruptly fired by ABC after posting a tweet that many believed was racist. Now, Barr is speaking out to reveal the surprising reason that she posted this tweet in the first place.
Barr Sounds Off On Controversial Tweet
“The way I feel about it is that God told me to do what I did, and it was a nuclear bomb,” Barr, 72, told Variety. “The day of my tweet, over 2 million Americans Googled Valerie Jarrett and the Iran deal. And that was my intent. So, whatever.”
Barr was cancelled by Hollywood in 2018 after she tweeted a photo of Barack Obama’s former advisor Valerie Jarrett next to the Planet of the Apes actress Helena Bonham Carter.
“Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” Barr wrote alongside it.
This landed Barr in hot water, as Jarrett is of African American descent. Despite this, Barr believes to this day that she posted “the perfect caption.”
“I was already having nightmares about never going back to that show [Roseanne], and God woke me up,” Barr recalled.
“I had my laptop there in bed, as always, and I opened it, and there was [an X post with] a picture of Valerie Jarrett next to Helena Bonham Carter in full makeup as Ari in Planet of the Apes, and they looked like Xerox copies of each other, so I captioned it,” she continued.
Related: Roseanne Barr Slams Former Co-Star Sara Gilbert – ‘She Stabbed Me In The Back’
ABC Responds
Due to this tweet, ABC immediately cancelled the reboot of Barr’s sitcom Roseanne despite its high ratings. Channing Dungey, ABC’s Entertainment president at the time, said that Barr’s words were “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.”
“There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing,” added Disney CEO Bob Iger.
Barr, however, wasn’t having any of it. To this day, she does not believe that her tweet was racist. In fact, she thinks that it says more about others if they believe it was racist.
“They were so racist that they thought my tweet said Black people look like monkeys when it was about Planet of the Apes, which is a movie about fascism,” she explained. “Rod Serling himself said it’s about the Jews in Germany. It is not a movie about Black people, Bob.”
After canceling Roseanne, ABC immediately rebooted the show as The Conners. They killed off Barr’s character and brought back the entire rest of the cast. The Conners ran for seven seasons before it finally aired its final episode back in April.
“I felt very pissed off that they stole my rights and killed me,” Barr lamented. “It was so stupid and shortsighted, and I don’t know how they answer to their shareholders for canceling me before even one sponsor pulled out.”
Related: Roseanne Barr Reveals How God Has Helped Her Through Tough Times In Life – ‘Pray With Me’
Barr Torches Cancel Culture
Last month, Barr blamed cancel culture for her 2018 firing.
“They were waiting for me to slip up,” she said of ABC executives. Indeed, she suggested that they were against her pro-Donald Trump political views.
“They spied, they monitored everything I did,” Barr alleged. “They wanted to censor me from the very beginning…they hijacked that tweet and made out it aid something that it didn’t. I’m not stupid. I would never refer to a black person as the product of an ape.”
Though she initially apologized for the controversial tweet, Barr has since taken that back.
“The worst mistake you can do is apologize to the left. Then they are on a crusade against you,” Barr concluded. “Once you admit a mistake, they will keep on until you’re dead.”
While many were offended by Barr’s tweet, seemingly just as many people have continued to support her over the years. Only time will tell if Barr is ever able to truly bounce back from this and resume her Hollywood career!
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