Roseanne Barr may be digging herself deeper regarding the controversy around the racist tweet she posted in May, in which she compared former Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape. In the ensuing scandal, the 65-year-old lost her job on the Roseanne revival, which was initially canceled and then rebranded as The Conners.
Now the comedian is doubling down on her claim that she thought Jarrett, 61, is a white woman.
Barr reiterates her past remarks in a video posted to her YouTube account, which appears to be an excerpt from a longer video interview (though the actress provides no context).
In the video, a visibly agitated Barr smokes a cigarette while her interviewer makes a long-winded analogy to a hypothetical presidential scandal.
“I’m trying to talk about Iran!” Barr interjects. “I’m trying to talk about, Valerie Jarrett wrote the Iran deal! … That’s what my tweet was about!”
“I know,” the interviewer replies. “You’ve explained this literally 300 times.”
Then Barr starts screaming: “I thought the bitch was white! Goddamnit! I thought the bitch was white! F—k!”
The video comes just two weeks after Barr addressed Jarrett in a July 6 episode of the Rabbi Shmuley Podcast. “The work of your hands … makes me feel threatened,” she said at the time. “I shouldn’t have said, you know, like you said — don’t make it personal. But you kind of have to when it’s, like, the work of your hand is what I’m against — not you personally — but the work of your hands.”
Barr apologized for her actions in a prior episode of the Rabbi Shmuley Podcast, saying, “Of course I’m not a racist. I’m an idiot. I might have done something that comes across as a bigoted and ignorant, and I know that that’s how it came across … I never would have wittingly called any black person and say they are a monkey. I just wouldn’t do that, and I didn’t do that, and that people think that I did that — it just kills me.”
