Roseanne Barr is once again revisiting the moment that ended her long and complicated run in Hollywood. Speaking in a recent interview, the comedian and former sitcom star said that she has been “erased from history” since ABC canceled the reboot of Roseanne in 2018, following a tweet about a former Obama adviser that sparked swift backlash.
Barr noted that ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel for several days this month after remarks that were criticized, but allowed him to return to late-night. “He got a six-day suspension,” Barr said. “I got my whole life ruined. No forgiveness. And all of my work stolen.”
It was a jarring fall. When Roseanne returned to television in March 2018, it pulled in more than 18 million viewers on its debut night—numbers almost unheard of in modern network television. Just two months later, the show was gone. ABC cited Barr’s racially offensive tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a senior aide to President Barack Obama, as the reason for the cancellation.
The network later revived the series as The Conners, removing Barr’s character entirely. To this day, Barr argues she has been written out not only of the show but of the larger conversation about television pioneers. She said, “I’m never mentioned in anything anymore. Especially when they talk about censorship, which is hilarious. I’ve been socially erased everywhere.”
Barr also accused Hollywood of operating under a double standard, pointing to past instances of performers appearing in blackface sketches—most notably Kimmel and comedian Sarah Silverman. “They understand racism in a way different than I do,” she said. “They are the arbiters of taste, of course, and racism and everything else.”
Her frustration, however, isn’t only with the industry. Barr spoke about being excluded from lists of feminist trailblazers and cultural groundbreakers despite being one of the few women to headline and produce a network sitcom in the late 1980s and 1990s. Roseanne broke ground by portraying a working-class Midwestern family that struggled with bills and job loss, at a time when most primetime comedies avoided those subjects.
Barr maintains she was “trolled” and “set up,” insisting that she misidentified Jarrett’s heritage in the original tweet. “It was a mistake,” she said. “I thought she was a white woman from Iran.” She also claimed that once the racist label stuck, her defenders disappeared.
ABC executives did not revisit their decision then, and they haven’t since. At the time, Channing Dungey, then president of ABC Entertainment, said the tweet was “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.”
Barr has spent the years since working on podcasts, stand-up specials, and smaller independent projects, but she argues she has been excluded from mainstream outlets. “I was erased from the history of feminism,” she said. “It’s just amazing how things work. People forget who opened doors.”
