Roseanne Barr Calls Martin Luther King Jr. Her ‘Idol’ in New Interview

Roseanne Barr was interviewed by the Jerusalem Post this week, and had an interesting tangent when asked about her thoughts on famous civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

According to the former Roseanne star, she considers King to be a role model for her.

“He’s my idol,” Barr said during the interview. “He is my idol.”

Large portions of the interview revolved around Barr’s tweet in May that resulted in her highly-rated sitcom being canceled by ABC.

“Muslim Brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj,” Barr wrote on May 29, aimed at former Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.

“It’s really hard to say this but, I didn’t mean what they think I meant,” Barr said when asked why she wrote the tweet after saying how she felt about King. “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. But I didn’t mean it the way they’re saying I meant it.”

Elsewhere in the interview Barr repeated the claim she had made shortly after backlash of the tweet began that she thought Jarrett was white.

“Valerie Jarrett, I don’t agree with her politics and I thought she was white, I did not know she was a black woman,” Barr said. “When ABC called me and said what is the reason for your egregious racism, I said, “Oh my God, it is a form of racism. I guess I didn’t know she was black, and I’ll cop to it, but I thought she was white.

“I ask people if you look at my tweet don’t defend me. I’ve done something egregious and I don’t want to be defended,” she continued. “I don’t want to get anymore racism going from what I did, I don’t want that. I don’t want to be defended.”

On Thursday, ABC announced a spin-off of Roseanne titled The Conners would be airing in the Fall 2018 television season. Barr will not be a member of the cast, and the network said in a statement that she would not have any financial or creative ties to the project.