Roseanne Barr is now attributing her infamous 2018 tweet widely condemned as racist and ultimately responsible for the end of her career—to divine instruction.
Seven years after the controversy, the 72-year-old actress told Variety in a new interview that it was God who prompted her to post the now-deleted message on X (formerly Twitter) about Valerie Jarrett, a former Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama.
“The way I feel about it is God told me to do what I did, and it was a nuclear bomb,” Barr said.
She claimed she had been “having nightmares” about returning to her role on ABC’s Roseanne, until “God woke [her] up.”
She described waking in bed with her laptop nearby, where she saw an image comparing Jarrett to Helena Bonham Carter’s character from Planet of the Apes.
“They looked like Xerox copies of each other, so I captioned it,” she recalled.
The tweet read: “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
Despite widespread backlash, Barr continues to stand by what she called a “perfect caption.”
She also reiterated a long-standing claim that she was unaware Jarrett is Black, and denied the tweet was racist.
“Other people were so racist that they thought my tweet said Black people look like monkeys—when it was about Planet of the Apes, which is a movie about fascism,” she argued. “Rod Serling himself said it’s about the Jews in Germany. It is not a movie about Black people.”
Barr has previously said she was under the influence of alcohol and Ambien when she posted the message. She quit social media shortly afterward.
She added, “Over 2 million Americans Googled Valerie Jarrett and the Iran deal after that tweet. That was my intent. So whatever.”
In the aftermath, ABC canceled Roseanne. The show was rebranded and revived without her as The Conners, with Barr’s character killed off via an opioid overdose.
She criticized that creative decision in her Variety interview, calling it “stupid and shortsighted.”
“I felt very pissed off that they stole my rights and killed me,” she said. “I don’t know how they answer to their shareholders for canceling me before even one sponsor pulled out.”
Barr also expressed regret over previously apologizing for the tweet.
“When I apologized, it only got worse,” she said.
Six years before this latest interview, Barr had blamed her former co-star, Sara Gilbert, for the collapse of her career. Gilbert, who played Darlene Conner on Roseanne, called the tweet “abhorrent” at the time.
“She destroyed the show and my life with that tweet,” Barr told the Washington Post in 2019.
