Roseanne goes teary over her racist tweet
Roseanne Barr broke down in tears and spoke of her regret over her racist Valerie Jarrett tweet in a podcast hosted by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.
The comedian phoned into the episode just two days after firing off the offending tweet, but Boteach declined to release the audio until Sunday “out of respect” for his longtime friend.
During the half-hour talk, Barr repeatedly insisted she was not there to make excuses for herself, but instead believed her words had been misconstrued.
“When you hurt people, even unwittingly, there’s no excuse,” she said. “I apologize to anyone who thought that, or felt offended, and who thought that I meant something that I in fact did not mean.”
In the May 29 tweet, Barr wrote that former Barack Obama adviser Jarrett was what would happen if “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.”
In another tweet that day, she falsely called liberal philanthropist George Soros “a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth.”
“I definitely feel remorse,” Barr, 65, told Boteach as she broke down in tears. “I’m a lot of things, I’m a loudmouth and all that stuff, but I’m not stupid for God’s sake, and I never would have wittingly called any black person a monkey. I would never do that and I didn’t do that. And that people think that I did that, it just kills me.”
Barr also claimed that ABC asked her to quit Twitter before officially inking her reboot contract, and that she agreed at first but insisted she be able to defend Israel and the Jewish people.
It was that commitment to her religion, she said, that sparked her beef with Jarrett in the first place.
“Valerie Jarrett, I don’t agree with her politics. And I thought she was white, I did not know she was a black woman,” Barr said. “I kind of think of her as somebody who is trying to subvert freedom for me. I am not defending myself . ... I was talking about her and the Obama administration and the things that they did that I feel are antiJew and I have to.”
“Roseanne,” which was a ratings monster for ABC, was canceled within hours of Barr’s tweets.
The network on Thursday announced that the series will return as “The Conners” without Barr, who will have no financial or creative involvement.
“I’ve lost everything,” she said on the podcast. “And I regretted it before I lost everything and I said to God, ‘I am willing to accept whatever consequences this brings because I know I’ve done wrong.’ And I do, and I have.”