Roseanne apologizes for Valerie Jarrett tweet in free-wheeling Hannity interview – By Max Greenwood (thehill.com) / July 26 2018
Roseanne Barr maintained during a free-wheeling interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday night that her tweet going after former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett was political and not racist.
ABC canceled Barr’s namesake sitcom “Roseanne” in May after she tweeted that Jarrett, who is black and was born in Iran to American parents, looked like the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”
Barr insisted on Thursday that her comments were not intended to be racist, but were instead political. She described her shock when she first found out that the tweet had been interpreted as a racial epithet.
“The first thing was shock that they were saying it was racial when it was politics,” she told Hannity. “And that was a hard one to take.”
“And then everyone started saying I was a racist, which is the worst thing you could call a Jewish person,” she continued.
At one point during the interview Thursday, Barr appeared to speak directly to Jarrett, saying that she was sorry that her tweet made the former senior Obama aide “feel harmed and hurt.” But she also insisted that her comment was misunderstood.
“Valerie, let’s discuss this,” Barr said. “Don’t assume you know what I meant, because I think you don’t know what I meant, and I would like to make it clearer to you what I did mean.”
But she also added in the interview: “I would tell her she needs a new haircut.”
Throughout the wide-ranging interview, Barr repeatedly said that her tweet was misinterpreted. She said the comment was meant to ask for “accountability from the previous administration about the Iran deal, which Valerie Jarrett is the author of, and that was what was in my head.”
Barr, a staunch supporter of President Trump, also insisted that she was politically moderate, and that extreme views on the left and right had “marginalized the middle.”
She acknowledged that her comment about Jarrett was a mistake. But also said that she had been wrongly villainized in the media.
“I made a mistake obviously. It cost me everything. My life’s work. Everything,” she said. “I made a mistake.”
Jarrett, who in May called Barr’s controversial tweets a “teaching moment” about racism, brushed off questions this week about her, saying the controversy doesn’t keep her up at night.
“Roseanne who?” Jarrett said on ABC’s “The View,” adding, “In all seriousness … I’m fine.”
