Roseanne Barr is still defending the racist tweet that led to the cancelation of her show, Roseanne. In 2018, Roseanne took to Twitter, now X, to share a racist post about Valerie Jarrett, who was Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama. Now, in 2025, she’s still trying to justify the post — and bringing God into it.
During a recent interview with Variety, Roseanne defended the tweet and continued to describe her caption as “perfect.” The day that she posted it, she fell asleep and was “having nightmares about never going back to [her] show.”
“God woke me up,” she told the publication. “I had my laptop there in bed, as always, and I opened it, and there was [an X post with] a picture of Valerie Jarrett next to Helena Bonham Carter in full makeup as Ari in Planet of the Apes, and they looked like Xerox copies of each other, so I captioned it.”
She captioned the image with, “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” Even now, Roseanne thinks it was “the perfect caption” and doesn’t see her post as racist.
Instead of taking responsibility for the post, she blamed the (many) people who saw it as racist. “They were so racist that they thought my tweet said Black people look like monkeys when it was about Planet of the Apes, which is a movie about fascism,” she said.
And she doesn’t have any regrets about the post, as she believes “God told” her to share it. “The way I feel about it is that God told me to do what I did, and it was a nuclear bomb,” she said, describing how the tweet garnered lots of attention. “The day of my tweet, over 2 million Americans Googled Valerie Jarrett and the Iran deal. And that was my intent. So, whatever.”
She told the publication that at that time, she was “irate” because of the Iran nuclear deal. Previously, when attempting to explain the Valerie Jarrett tweet, Roseanne said that she didn’t know that the politician was Black. The tweet was not meant to be a racist attack, and was instead meant to critique the Iran nuclear deal, she explained. Additionally, she said she had been influenced by the alcohol, Ambien, and antidepressants in her system at the time that she posted.
During a Fox News interview in 2018, Roseanne stated, “I feel like I have apologized and explained and asked for forgiveness and made recompense.”
But now, she says she never should’ve apologized. “I made the mistake of apologizing, and it only got worse after that,” she told Variety. “Never apologize to the Left because they rub that jackboot right in your face in the mud if you apologize.”
