Roseanne Barr just lobbed a grenade into the cancel-culture debate and she’s pointing the finger at none other than former President Barack Obama. On Wednesday, September 18, Barr fired off a scorching reply to Obama on X (formerly Twitter) after he posted about the dangers of government overreach and censorship in the media. Obama wrote, “After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.”
But Barr wasn’t buying it. She shot back, “Remember when you and your wife called Bob Iger to have me fired?” The claim instantly set social media ablaze, with thousands of comments flooding in as fans and critics tried to unpack what exactly Barr was alleging.
Roseanne Barr’s Exit From ABC
Barr’s bombshell accusation comes after Barr claimed ABC “spied” on her before her firing. “They spied,” Barr alleged in her interview with the Daily Mail earlier this year. “They wanted to censor me from the very beginning.” Her fall from grace came swiftly after she tweeted a racially charged comment about former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett in the middle of the night, writing that Jarrett looked like “the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and ‘Planet of the Apes’ had a baby.” The backlash was immediate and fierce. ABC canceled the highly rated reboot of “Roseanne,” calling the remarks “abhorrent” and “inconsistent with our values.”
ABC executives condemned Barr’s words as unacceptable and abruptly canceled the show despite its huge popularity. To keep the franchise alive, the network launched The Conners later that year, shifting the spotlight to the rest of the family. In its debut episode, the writers addressed Barr’s absence by revealing that her character, Roseanne Conner, had died from an opioid overdose — a dramatic end to one of TV’s most iconic matriarchs.
Now, nearly a decade later, Barr is suggesting there was far more at play, and that the decision may have involved direct pressure from the Obamas on then-Disney CEO Bob Iger. Neither Barack nor Michelle Obama has responded to O’Donnell’s allegation, and Disney has not issued a statement addressing the claim.
