Getty Images
Roseanne Barr Cries During First Podcast Interview After Her Racist Tweet Scandal
She's really remorseful. Disgraced actress Roseanne Barr is still reeling from the scandal surrounding her racist tweet that she shared over Memorial Day weekend and the aftermath of it, which led to ABC canceling the reboot of her sitcom, Roseanne. During an interview with her friend, Rabbi Shmuley on his podcast, Roseanne broke down in tears as she opened up about the entire scandal.
"I didn’t mean what they think I meant and that’s why it’s so painful. But I have to face that," she said. "When you hurt people even unwittlingly, there’s no excuse and I apologize to anyone who felt offended and who thought that I meant something that I in fact did not mean, to my own ignorance. I didn’t mean it the way they’re saying I meant it."
On Monday, May 28, Roseanne shared a tweet comparing Valerie Jarrett — a black woman who had worked under the Obama administration — to a monkey. "Muslim brotherhood [and] planet of the apes had a baby = vj," Roseanne wrote in a now-deleted tweet. She has since offered a handful of explanations for her racist comment, first stating that her tweet came at 2 a.m. when she was "impaired" because she had taken Ambien, and then she said her tweet was not racist because she did not know that Valerie was black.
But either way, Roseanne said she did not excuse her behavior and she doesn't want anyone else to defend her for what she did, because she's ready to accept the consequences of her actions — even though she vehemently denied that she compared a black woman to a monkey.
"I definitely feel remorse," she said as she broke down in tears. "I have black children in my family. I can’t let them say these things about me after 30 years of putting my family and my health and my livelihood at risk to stand up for people. I’m a lot of things, I’m a loud mouth and all that stuff, but I’m not stupid for god’s sake. And I never would have wittingly called any black person or say they are a monkey, I never would do that and I didn’t do that. And people think that I did that, it just kills me. I didn’t do that."
