NEW SPIN

Roseanne Barr Makes Bonkers Claim About ‘Fighting Racism’

Barr shared some revisionist history in a new interview.

Roseanne Barr claims she’s dedicated her “whole life” to combating racism in a new interview.

Barr told The Hollywood Reporter that when ABC canceled the Roseanne revival amid backlash to her tweet comparing Valerie Jarrett, an Iranian-African American adviser to Barack Obama, to the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes,” the network called her and said, “You have a choice to make: You can sign off on letting us do a show without you [or everyone is out of a job].”

“The only thing that mattered to me at the time is, I said, ‘I want you to say I’m not a racist, and that you know I’m not a racist, and that my whole life has been about fighting racism,’” Barr claimed.

She said she was told by Roseanne executive producer Tom Werner, “I will do that once you sign away your rights. And also I promise you, if you sign away your rights for this season, that we’ll make sure that everybody knows you did it to save the jobs of the crew.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to Werner for comment.

The revival continued as The Conners, sans Barr. Werner said in a statement to The Washington Post, “It’s my belief that Roseanne is not a racist person, although I find the tweet to be repugnant and racist.”

Barr starred in the hit sitcom Roseanne from 1988 to 1997. The network revived the show in 2018, then canceled it after just nine episodes following Barr’s post. At the time, Barr said she didn’t know Jarrett was Black. Still, she told Variety last June that the post was “the perfect caption,” and that “God told” her to post it.

She revealed her support for Trump ahead of the Roseanne revival in 2018, but has taken her embrace of MAGA to new heights since her show was canceled.

When her former TV son, Michael Fishman, 44, said in August that Barr was “rightfully canceled” because her tweet caused “damage,” was “dehumanizing,” and “perpetuated racial tropes,” she dropped the F-word 13 times in two minutes in her response.

She said on the Can’t Be Censored podcast, “I told him, ‘Let me explain this to you, Michael: Go and f--- yourself and stay f---ed ‘till the day you die. Don’t f---ing put my name in your f---ing mouth. Shut the f--- up. You are an ignoramus and a bigot, and you have no idea what I said, because it contradicts the Democrat party that you’ve had shoved down your throat and up your a--. And so just f--- you.”

After the initial fallout, Barr alleged that she was under the influence of the sleeping pill Ambien when she’d written the tweet.

Ambien’s manufacturer, Sanofi-Aventis, fired back in a post on X, “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”

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Barr’s newest comments are part of promotion for her upcoming sitcom Meemaw, in which she plays the grandmother of a “mixed-race family of preppers in Texas” who is trying to “take down a criminal empire and throw her granddaughter the most fantastic bat mitzvah,” according to Page Six. No networks or streamers have confirmed they’ll air it.

The cast consists of MAGA-supporting actors like Randy Quaid, Drea de Matteo, and Tony Hinchcliffe. Barr said the show avoids a right-wing skew.

Barr told The Hollywood Reporter that Meemaw is “the funniest s--- I’ve ever done.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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