Roseanne Barr apologized again for the racially-charged tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, which led to the Roseanne revival’s cancellation, in a new podcast interview. Recorded and released by the comedian’s spiritual adviser, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Barr spends much of the 35-minute interview, which was recorded the day after ABC cancelled the series and fired her, apologizing for her behavior on social media. Of course, the comic also tries to claim she didn’t mean what everybody thought she did by her tweets.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Barr explained it as follows:
“It’s really hard to say this but, I didn’t mean what they think I meant,” Barr said of her tweet. “And that’s what’s so painful. But I have to face that it hurt people. When you hurt people, even unwillingly, there’s no excuse. I don’t want to run off and blather on with excuses. But I apologize to anyone who thought, or felt offended and who thought that I meant something that I, in fact, did not mean. It was my own ignorance, and there’s no excuse for that ignorance.”
She also revived her initial Ambien defense, saying “that’s no excuse, but that is what was real.” (Not only did nobody buy Barr’s Ambien defense at the time, but the pharmaceutical company that produces it also released a statement noting “racism is not a known side effect.”)
As for her comments about Jarrett specifically, the actress claimed she thought she was white. “I don’t agree with her politics and I thought she was white, I did not know she was a black woman,” she explained. “I guess I didn’t know she was black, and I’ll cop to it, but I thought she was white.” In addition to releasing the interview on his SoundCloud account, Boteach published an edited transcript on Facebook.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)