Roseanne Barr is still mad at ABC and Sara Gilbert.
Of course, we knew that already; the comedian returned to stand-up earlier this year with a Fox Nation special subtly titled Cancel This! and seized her comeback tour as an opportunity to drop some fresh soundbites calling out her former home network for firing her over a tweet about Valerie Jarrett back in 2018. Now, it appears that Barr has returned to prodding her former Roseanne co-star as well.
During an appearance this week on Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show, the comedian said, “It wasn’t enough that [Gilbert] stabbed me in the back and did what she did to me there, but then she would go on her talk show every day and talk about how shocked she was at my racism on top of it.”
“It was every day,” Barr added, referring to Gilbert’s alleged comments about her on The Talk. “I had done that show when she needed a guest in sweeps; I went on there every time she asked me in sweeps.”
At one point, Barr recalled calling Gilbert; she adopted a lower, gravelly tone as she re-enacted her warning, “You better shut your f—ing mouth about me. I’m telling you, you better shut your f—ing mouth.”
“And she did,” Barr concluded, adding later, “My voice can be very scary.”
ABC fired Barr in 2018 after she posted a tweet mocking Barack Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett with the taunt “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” Gilbert, who created and formerly co-hosted The Talk, called Barr’s tweet “abhorrent” at the time. The network fired Barr hours after she posted her tweet.
But Barr doesn’t seem to believe her tweet was the one to blame at all. Speaking with Kelly about Gilbert, the comedian said, “It was her tweet that canceled the show.”
At another point during her interview, Barr told Kelly that she believes ABC “wanted me to kill myself.” The comedian also claimed that “all” of her friends shared that belief. (She name-checked Norm MacDonald and Bob Einstein, both of whom are now deceased, as examples.) “They said, ‘They’re trying to push you to suicide,’” Barr recounted.
This is far from the first time Barr has spoken out about her firing or Gilbert; perhaps her most colorful quote came in 2019, when she said that her former co-star “will never get enough until she consumes my liver with a fine Chianti.” (A representative for Gilbert did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment at the time.) She has also aired her grievances against ABC and other players in the debacle on multiple occasions.
This February, during an appearance on Fox News, Barr blasted ABC for allegedly refusing to “allow me to go on any of their other shows and apologize” for her tweet—which, at the time, she blamed on Ambien. (In addition to Gilbert, Barr has also claimed that Michelle Obama is responsible for her dismissal.)
Barr believes ABC should have invited her onto its shows whose hosts have faced “more egregious” firestorms of their own. Her main example? Jimmy Kimmel, who apologized in 2020 for past sketches in which he wore blackface.
“Jimmy Kimmel and his [former] girlfriend, Sarah Silverman, they did blackface, and [ABC] never even said ‘It is wrong that you did that,’” Barr said on Fox News in February. “And they just let that go.”
She, on the other hand, does not appear ready to let anything go anytime soon.
