Roseanne Barr makes explosive claim that ABC ‘spied' on her before firing

New York Post

4 days ago

Roseanne Barr is speaking her truth.
The comedian-turned-Hollywood pariah has made explosive claims about her former employer, ABC, with which she worked for over 10 years.
Barr, 72, first graced the network with her sitcom 'Roseanne' in 1988. The hit show, which also featured John Goodman (Dan Conner), Sara Gilbert (Darlene Conner), Laurie Metcalf (Jackie Harris), Johnny Galecki (David Healy) and more, lasted 10 seasons until 1997.
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ABC revived Barr and her TV family's characters for a 'Roseanne' reboot over two decades later — but her comeback was short-lived.
14 Roseanne Barr on 'The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon' in 2018.
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14 Roseanne Barr attends the premiere of ABC's 'Roseanne.'
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The star was abruptly fired for her outspoken tweet about former Barack Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, which she said the political aide looked like the offspring of the 'Muslim brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.'
ABC bosses killed the show despite its high ratings, blasting Barr's comment as 'abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.'
The network later created the spinoff 'The Conners,' featuring several of Barr's former co-stars and killing off her character. The spinoff lasted seven seasons and recently ended, with the finale airing in April.
However, Barr is now addressing the fourth wall in a defiant new interview with the Daily Mail published on Friday, May 30, claiming the cancel culture mob — which she alleged included her bosses — came for blood.
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14 Roseanne on the spinoff show.
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14 Roseanne and co-stars in a scene for the reboot.
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14 Roseanne Barr claims her ABC bosses were watching her every move.
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'They were waiting for me to slip up,' the comedian alleged in the interview, confirming she meant the left-leaning executives at the network, who she claimed were already on high alert about her outspoken support for Trump.
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'They spied. They monitored everything I did,' she claimed. 'They wanted to censor me from the very beginning.'
She also accused her ABC liberal bosses of allegedly hijacking her words about Jarrett.
'They hijacked that tweet and made out it said something that it didn't,' Barr insisted.
14 Roseanne was fired after she tweeted about Obama's political aide.
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Still, Bob Iger, chief exec of the Walt Disney Company, ABC's corporate parent, said at the time, 'There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.'
The comedian said she was unaware of Jarrett's background, which includes being born in Iran and having African-American parents.
Following the backlash, Barr blamed her prescription medication for the comment, claiming she was 'Ambien tweeting' when she published her tweet.
14 She claimed the left-winged ABC execs were 'monitoring' her.
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14 She later apologized for the tweet but it was too late.
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However, the former star who fell from grace now insisted it wasn't about race at all.
'I'm not stupid. I would never refer to a black person as the product of an ape,' Barr told Daily Mail, insisting it was about Obama's Iran nuclear deal, which the comedian opposed.
'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,' Barr explained.
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She's also taking back her apology for the tweet, in which she claimed she was 'truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and looks,' saying her joke was 'in bad taste.'
14 She nows says that apologizing was a mistake.
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14 Roseanne also claimed she had behind the scenes drama with men in charge during her 'Roseanne' days.
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'The worst mistake you can do is apologize to the left. Then they are on a crusade against you,' she said in the new interview. 'Once you admit a mistake, they will keep on until you're dead.'
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Barr said she was butting heads with several men behind the scenes of 'Roseanne' decades before the tweet, insisting they had no grasp of what the average person at home wanted to watch.
She wanted a more humorous presence on the sitcom, accusing them of saving the best and most funny lines for her TV husband, Goodman.
14 Roseanne claims she wanted to tackle the political divide in the reboot but Goodman allegedly refused to play the Republican.
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'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 said.
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'It's all just elitists from Harvard. They did think the audience was deplorable, [whether] Democrat or Republican, at that time,' she continued.
At one point, Barr — who became the second-highest-paid woman on TV behind Oprah Winfrey — began rewriting her lines and threatening to boycott scenes.
14 She has since moved out of Hollywood and is living in Texas.
©Carsey-Werner Co/Courtesy Everett Collection
'I thought to myself, when this show goes to number one, here are the people I will fire. So I named everybody,' the comedian revealed.
Once it happened, Barr followed up on her word.
'Right after that, everyone who was on the bad boy and girl Santa list, they were fired as a motherf–ker,' she shared.
The comedian said that when she threw her support behind Trump in 2016, people were up in arms that she wasn't voting for the female candidate, Hillary Clinton.
14 Roseanne's character was killed off in the revival.
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'It was vaginal politics. It made me sick,' she said, adding that she wanted to tackle the political divide on the 'Roseanne' reboot.
'I wanted a Trump hater and a Hillary hater. They were pissed at each other but they loved each other,' she explained of her and Goodman's characters.
Barr shared that she wanted Goodman to play the Republican supporter to take some heat off of her and the idea that she was a MAGA mouthpiece.
'John refused. It fell to me. I looked like a crusader,' she stated.
14 She's gearing up for her new documentary, which will be released next month.
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Barr also claimed that her Republican forward tweets made her ABC bosses sweat, claiming they allegedly asked her to delete several of them.
The Post reached out to ABC for comment.
Barr has since left Hollywood and is living on a ranch in Texas with her son, Jake, his wife and their daughters. She has no plan to return to Tinsel Town.
'It's a very liberal city, that's why I live outside of it,' the comedian said.
That doesn't mean she won't be back on the TV screen.
Barr is telling her side of the story in an upcoming documentary, 'Roseanne Barr is America,' by conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert, releasing on several streaming platforms on June 10.