Comedian Roseanne Barr said that being “canceled” in 2018 “ruined” her life and made it “unsafe” for her to appear in public during a recent appearance on Fox News.
The actress and stand-up comic also complained that other TV stars at her former network, ABC, have made worse mistakes but suffered lesser consequences.
Barr’s sitcom, “Roseanne,” had just returned to television after two decades when ABC canceled it two months later in May 2018. The network condemned Barr’s tweet that Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, would be the result if “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.”
“The next day, it was ‘racist, racist, racist, racist, racist,’ which ruined my life and made it unsafe for me to walk down the street,” she said.
“I felt like, oh my God … I’m being used by a political machine, which has exposed itself over the interceding five years since,” she continued.
At the time, Barr quickly apologized for the “joke,” which she said was “in bad taste,” and said she would quit Twitter, as reported by the Hollywood Reporter. But ABC still canceled her revived sitcom, calling her tweet “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values,” the New York Times reported.
“I felt like I fell on the sword of the double standards of the left,” Barr said, adding that mistakes by other ABC stars have been “far more egregious than the mistake I made.”
During the Fox News appearance, Barr pointed out that ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel has been exposed for previously wearing racist makeup known as “blackface,” but still has his show. “The View” host Joy Behar, who was revealed to have once darkened her skin while dressing as a black woman for Halloween, is also still on that show.
Barr described her mistake as having “racially misgendered a person that I assumed to be white.”
“I assumed she was an Iranian woman,” she said. “I guess they saw because I supported President Trump, or whatever reason they had, they saw also an opening to take my show away from me.”
