Roseanne Barr returned to ABC in 2018 after spending several years off the air, but everything came crashing down after her tweet about former President Barack Obama aide Valerie Jarrett – and she says that was the network’s plan all along.
In an interview with the Daily Mail published Friday, Barr claimed the network “monitored everything I did” and was looking for any excuse to to remove her: “They were waiting for me to slip up,” she said. “They spied. They monitored everything I did. They wanted to censor me from the very beginning.”
“They hijacked that tweet and made out it said something that it didn’t,” Barr added.
In 2018, Barr tweeted that Jarrett, who was born in Iran to Black American parents, looked like the “Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby.”
Barr also attempted to walk back the comment to the Daily Mail. “‘The Planet of the Apes’ movie is about a fascist takeover of the world – and that is what I was talking about,” she said. “The tweet was intended as a humorous political statement and not a racial one. But liberals in Hollywood are so racist, they automatically think of a Black person.”
The actress and comedian gave her first televised interview after being fired to Fox News in July 2018. The following year she appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where she blasted ABC’s decision to cancel the “Roseanne” reboot as “the worst, most horrible thing I’ve ever been through.”
“It’s all because I said that I like [Donald] Trump,” Barr added. “A lot of cabals in Hollywood, that’s all they needed to hear: ‘She must be destroyed.’”
ABC did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
