Roseanne Barr Exposes ABC’s Tactics Before Firing and Shares Regret in New Interview

The blue-collar queen of comedy was back on her primetime throne.

Roseanne Barr had returned to ABC in 2018 after a two-decade hiatus, delivering sky-high ratings and even receiving a congratulatory phone call from President Donald Trump.

Then she torpedoed her own career resurgence with a shocking 2am tweet about former Barack Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett.

Barr insisted she had no idea about Jarrett’s African-American ancestry when suggesting that the political aide looked like the ‘Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby’.

But the backlash was immediate and the cancel culture mob came baying for blood.

Network bosses axed the ‘Roseanne’ reboot and condemned the comment as ‘abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values’.

America’s ‘domestic goddess’ became an irredeemable racist overnight – all because of what she insists was a misunderstood joke about authoritarian regimes.

‘They were waiting for me to slip up,’ she says in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail.

By ‘they’, she means liberal-leaning ABC executives who were, 72-year-old Barr claims, queasy over her populist views and unabashed support for Trump.

‘They spied. They monitored everything I did. They wanted to censor me from the very beginning,’ an unrepentant Barr says.

‘They hijacked that tweet and made out it said something that it didn’t.’

The comedienne will recall the bitter clash with cancel culture in an upcoming documentary, ‘Roseanne Barr is America’, by conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert.

Certainly, the fall from grace was unprecedented – as was the sudden cancellation of a smash-hit sitcom with some of the highest ratings for a new TV series in years.

But Bob Iger, chief exec of the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s corporate parent, insisted: ‘There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.’

At the time, Barr offered various explanations for the jab at Jarrett, who was born in Iran but had African-American parents.

She blamed her lack of judgment on ‘Ambien tweeting’, referring to her habit of going online late at night after taking prescription medication for insomnia.

But it was, Barr now insists, nothing to do with race and instead about the fact Jarrett was a key player in Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which the comedienne, a vocal supporter of Israel, bitterly opposed.

‘I’m not stupid. I would never refer to a black person as the product of an ape,’ she says.

‘The Planet of the Apes movie is about a fascist takeover of the world – and that is what I was talking about. 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.’

And so today, the main thing Barr regrets is saying sorry.

‘The worst mistake you can do is apologize to the left. Then they are on a crusade against you,’ she says.

‘Once you admit a mistake, they will keep on until you’re dead.’

Barr has been battling against left-wing ideology in some form or other for seven decades.

The eldest of four siblings, she was born to Jewish parents in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1952. 

After suffering a brain injury when hit by a car at age 16, Barr woke up a changed person – drinking, smoking and skipping school. Her family had her committed to a state mental institution for more than eight months.

‘Actually, I thought it was a more lively place than my own home,’ Barr tells Gilbert, whose previous films include ‘Trump: The Art of the Insult’.

At 17, Barr became pregnant and her parents, Helen and Jerome Hershel ‘Jerry’ Barr, sent their wayward daughter to a Salvation Army facility in Denver, where she gave birth to girl and put the baby up for adoption.

‘Mom didn’t want the neighbors to be ashamed of her,’ Barr explained. 

‘When I look back on that I bust a gut laughing because they were all drunks and perverts.’

Barr stayed in Denver and vowed to return home one day as a famous TV star with her own show.

She kicked things off with stand-up gigs in biker bars, jazz clubs and Unitarian churches, eschewing the traditional comedy fare for a more pioneering approach that she called ‘funny womanness’.

One woman didn’t find it funny, however, pointedly turning her chair away mid routine when Barr made a joke about feminine hygiene.

She wouldn’t let radical feminism ‘penetrate her brain’, Barr said, laughing.

But she was soon making good on her vow, performing at LA’s Comedy Store and appearing on the Tonight Show in 1985. Nervous, she delivered her final joke and dashed off stage instead of sitting down with host Johnny Carson.

The Roseanne show debuted on October 18, 1988, drawing in 21.4 million households to watch the Conners, a working-class American family that resembled many of their own.

Behind the scenes, Barr was already butting heads with male writers who she says toned down her progressive humor and reserved the funniest lines for John Goodman, her on-screen husband, Dan.

‘They were aghast. They said people are not gonna go for this. I go, “working class people are like this – they are not like your wife. They don’t have servants”,’ Barr says.

‘It’s all just elitists from Harvard. They did think the audience was deplorable, [whether] Democrat or Republican, at that time.’

Barr – by then the second highest paid woman in showbiz, trailing only Oprah Winfrey – was rewriting her lines and even threatened to boycott scenes.

But she stuck it out and was vindicated when Roseanne leapfrogged The Cosby Show in 1989 to become the nation’s favorite sitcom.

‘I thought to myself, when this show goes to number one, here are the people I will fire. So I named everybody,’ she says.

‘Right after that, everyone who was on the bad boy and girl Santa list, they were fired as a mother*****r.’

There were more highs and lows as Barr’s acid-tongue and unfiltered opinions rubbed some up the wrong way.

Her infamous off-key rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner ahead of a July 1990 Padres-Reds baseball game was condemned as ‘disgraceful’ by then-president George H.W. Bush.

When Roseanne wrapped after nine seasons, Barr landed her own talk show, hosted Saturday Night Live and embarked on a world comedy tour with several HBO specials.

She ran for president in 2012 as a ‘loudmouth socialist’, calling herself ‘the only serious comedian in the race’ and pledging to slap Nancy Pelosi, the-then Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives, in the face.

At the 2016 election, she threw her support behind Donald Trump, the eventual winner.

‘They couldn’t believe I wasn’t voting for Hillary Clinton,’ she says. ‘It was vaginal politics. It made me sick.’

And when Barr agreed in 2017 to reboot her beloved sitcom, she pledged to tackle the growing political divide head on.

‘I wanted a Trump hater and a Hillary hater. They were p****d at each other but they loved each other,’ she says.

And, initially, she wanted Goodman to play the Republican, to defuse accusations that the show was a MAGA mouthpiece promoting her own views.

‘John refused. It fell to me. I looked like a crusader,’ Barr says. 

Off-screen, her caustic tweets were also beginning to unsettle Democrat-backing network bosses.

ABC’s woke public relations enforcers – Barr refers to them throughout Gilbert’s film as the ‘LGBTQ+CIA mafia’ – were watching her every move.

She was asked to delete a tweet accusing Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg of giving a Nazi salute.

But it was that post in the early hours of May 29, 2018, likening Valerie Jarrett a character in Planet of the Apes that sealed Barr’s fate.

And while the cuts of being canceled run deep, Barr has rebounded with a successful podcast and plans for a new sitcom about a working-class Alabama farmer battling drug cartels – think Roseanne meets The Sopranos.

She now lives with her son Jake, his wife and their two daughters on a ranch outside Austin, Texas.

‘It’s a very liberal city, that’s why I live outside of it,’ she says, laughing. 

Barr teamed up with Gilbert, she says, to spread the word that there’s life after cancellation.

‘They’ll never get me. They’ll never take me down because I’m smarter – and funnier – than they are. And that’s the undercurrent of the documentary: you can’t destroy someone who doesn’t submit.’

• Roseanne Barr is America, directed and produced by Joel Gilbert of Highway 61 Entertainment, will be available on iTunes, Amazon Prime, YouTube Movies and other streaming platforms from June 10