Roseanne Barr, the 65-year-old actress had her eponymous sitcom cancelled by ABC earlier this year after she likened the political adviser to an ape, but Roseanne has insisted she didn’t mean it as a racial slur and she now wants to draw a line under the incident.
During a soon-to-air interview with Dr. Oz, he told Roseanne: “Some of the messages that connect the dots of racism are subtle. You said the word ‘ape’, in modern America.”
The veteran star then tried to clarify her comments, insisting she didn’t intend to cause such offence.
She said, according to the New York Post newspaper’s Page Six column: “No, I said, ‘Planet of the Apes’, that’s a movie … No, I know what you’re doing and everyone else does it … I said, ‘Planet of the Apes’, which is a science-fiction movie about the overthrow of evil overlords, such as Iran. And I have apologised for this…
“I thought Valerie Jarrett was an Iranian woman, like a lot of people. I didn’t understand that she was an African-American woman.
When I saw her on TV and she was doing her DNA test, and she’s also 46 percent European so let’s just move past it.”
In her original tweet, Roseanne said that Valerie – who served as the senior adviser to former US President Barack Obama – looked like the Muslim Brotherhood and ‘Planet of the Apes’ “had a baby”.
ABC president Channing Dungey subsequently said Roseanne had “crossed a line that cannot be crossed” with her tweet.
Explaining the decision to cancel her sitcom, he said: “[The decision] was actually made very swiftly, and what I’m going to have to say is that it was nice that it was so clear to everyone that there wasn’t a lot of debate and discussion about it.
We knew what we wanted to do, and we did it. “For us, we have had multiple instances with Roseanne, and certainly this tweet crossed the line that cannot be crossed, but it was for us a sense of enough is enough and something had to be done.”