Roseanne Barr posted many racist epithets on Twitter before her show was canceled this week, including her message about Susan Rice in 2013.
Barr’s sitcom revival was cancelled on Tuesday after she responded to a conspiracy theory on Twitter stating that former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett has illegally covered up crimes for the government. Barr’s reply shocked the world by implying Jarrett, an American born in Iran, was tied to the Muslim brotherhood while comparing her to an ape.
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Many of Barr’s co-stars and other associates immediately denounced the hate speech. The network reacted quickly as well, cancelling the lucrative show a few hours later. However, many pointed out that this was far from Barr’s first over-the-line tweet. The actress has invoked racist and anti-Semitic beliefs before, and often promotes bizarre conspiracy theories.
Back in 2013, she did just that when she tweeted about Susan Rice. Rice was President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, and another woman of color in Barr’s crosshairs.
“Susan rice is a man with big swinging ape balls,” Barr wrote at the time.
Back then, Barr was off of TV and consigned to her insular corner of Twitter, so no real consequences came her way. However, her rhetoric did not change as she returned to the spotlight this year. Since her show has been back, she has falsely claimed that a Parkland shooting survivor was a Nazi sympathizer, and promoted conspiracy theories such as PizzaGate and QAnon.
According to a report by CNN Money, top executives at ABC were hoping that Barr would slow down with these kinds of posts as the show rose to stardom. The insider said that on Tuesday morning, the network’s top brass viewed the tweet about Jarrett as the third or fourth major controversy Barr’s tweets had caused. They described Barr’s tweets as “unsurvivable,” adding that “enough was enough.”
Already fairly resigned to their decision, the executives called Barr to tell her that cancellation was a probability. She was reportedly apologetic on the phone, though the network believed that no amount of apologizing would set this straight for her.
“There was no way to come back from this,” a source said.
Since then, Barr has returned to social media with even more outlandish theories. She has retweeted a couple of posts suggesting that ABC’s Entertainment President Channing Dungey, yet another woman of color, spoke with Michelle Obama on the phone before deciding to cancel her show.
