Seven years after a racist tweet brought her career to a screeching halt, Roseanne Barr is still refusing to take accountability and is now pointing the finger at a higher power. In a new interview with Variety, published on Friday, the 72-year-old comedian claimed it was divine intervention that led her to post the now-infamous message about Valerie Jarrett, a former Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama, in 2018.
“The way I feel about it is God told me to do what I did, and it was a nuclear bomb,” Barr said of the tweet, which led to the cancellation of her ABC sitcom Roseanne just months after its highly anticipated reboot. Barr said she had been “having nightmares” about returning to the show and that her fateful tweet came shortly after waking up from one such dream.
“God woke [me] up,” she said. “I had my laptop there in bed, as always, and I opened it, and there was [a 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.” That caption? “Muslim Brotherhood & ‘Planet of the Apes’ had a baby = vj.”
Roseanne Barr Still Defends Racist Tweet That Got Her Show Canceled
The post was widely condemned as racist, prompting swift backlash and leading ABC to pull the plug on Roseanne. Jarrett, who is Black, was a longtime target of right-wing conspiracy theorists, and the tweet was seen as playing into deeply offensive racial tropes. But Barr still refuses to see it that way. Calling the post a “perfect caption,” she claimed she didn’t know Jarrett was Black and insisted the tweet was misinterpreted.
“[Other people] 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 argued. “[Screenwriter] Rod Serling himself said it’s about the Jews in Germany. It is not a movie about Black people.”
Barr has previously said she was under the influence of alcohol and Ambien when she posted the tweet and other controversial messages. At the time, she apologized publicly, but later walked back those statements and has since maintained that her words were taken out of context.
Despite the career fallout and ongoing criticism, Barr appears unrepentant, even defiant, about the incident that derailed her comeback. And now, she’s placing the blame far above Hollywood, and squarely on the will of God.
