Roseanne Barr is addressing Valerie Jarrett again, and once more, she has paired an apology with an insult. The 65-year-old appeared on Hannity on Thursday, July 26, for her first TV interview about the racist tweet she posted in May, in which she compared Jarrett, a 61-year-old former adviser to Barack Obama, to an ape.
Barr said on the Fox News show that she was “so shocked” by the racism claims: “The first [shock was] that they were saying [the tweet is] racial, when it’s political. And that was a hard one to take. And then everybody started saying I was a racist, which is, like, the worst thing that you can call a Jewish person, especially one who, like me, grew up with Holocaust survivors.”
She also seemed exasperated by her apology tour. “I’ve apologized a lot,” she told host Sean Hannity. “It’s been two months and I’ve — I feel that I have apologized and explained and asked for forgiveness and made recompense.”
But after 56-year-old Hannity prodded, Barr finally addressed Jarrett directly: “I’m so sorry that you thought I was racist and that you thought that my tweet was racist because it wasn’t. It was political. And I’m sorry for the misunderstanding that caused my ill-worded tweet. And, you know, I’m sorry that you feel harmed and hurt. I never meant that, and for that, I apologize. I never meant to hurt anybody or say anything negative about an entire race of people, which I think 30 years of my work can attest to.”
But the comedian wasn’t done — she took the opportunity to take another potshot at Jarrett. “Plus, I’d tell her she’s got to get a new haircut,” she said. “I mean, seriously. She needs a new haircut.”
Barr also claimed she’s off Twitter — “My kids took it away from me forever,” she said, but she has still been tweeting and retweeting posts in recent days. On July 23, for example, she claimed hypocrisy in the response to director James Gunn’s Twitter scandal. “I’m disgusted to read all of the support for James Gunn’s pedophile jokes — as the same people supported blacklisting me for a joke they didn’t even understand,” she wrote.
Prior to her appearance on Hannity, Barr gave a tearful interview in June on Rabbi Schmuley’s podcast. “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 would never have wittingly called any black person … say they are a monkey,” she insisted. “I would never do that! And I didn’t do that!”
Jarrett, 61, also addressed the controversy when she appeared on The View on July 25. “Roseanne who?” she asked before discussing the situation more seriously. “This isn’t want keeps me up at night. What keeps me up at night are those families being separated at the border,” the former government official said. “I mean, these are the things that keep me up at night, not a racist tweet.”
ABC immediately canceled the reboot of Barr’s hit sitcom, Roseanne, after the star’s tweet, condemning the message as “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent” with the network’s values. ABC later announced that it had picked up the spinoff The Conners, which would star the original cast minus Barr. The sitcom is set to premiere on October 16.
