Mocking the anthem? Running for president? Siding with Q-Anon? Roseanne Barr was poised
for tremendous success, but she just kept getting in her own way. Keep watching for
a rundown of the most problematic things she's ever done.
Back in 1990, Roseanne Barr was one of television's hottest stars. Her eponymous sitcom, which
debuted in 1988, took television by storm, and was lauded for its frank depiction of
a working-class Midwestern American family struggling to make ends meet.
"Our school's having a food drive for poor people."
"Well tell them to drive some of that food over here."
Yet it took less than 60 seconds for Barr to shift from America's sweetheart to Public
Enemy No. 1 when she sang "The Star Spangled Banner" at a baseball game. Not only was her
shrill and tuneless rendition of the national anthem met with boos by the crowd, she capped
off the cacophonous spectacle by grabbing her crotch and spitting on the ground. So
vilified was Barr that she was even criticized by then-President George H. W. Bush, with
UPI reporting he slammed the performance as disgraceful.
Barr attempted damage control, explaining the crotch-grab and spitting was meant to
mock baseball players — known to do both on the baseball diamond — and not America's
anthem. She said,
"I thought that it would be very funny. None of this was meant viciously. Nobody feels
worse than me."
In 1991, Roseanne Barr shared some shocking news with the congregation of a Denver church,
telling them that she was a survivor of childhood incest at the hands of her parents. In an
essay she wrote for People, Barr accused her mother of doing, quote, "lurid" things to
her when she was an infant that left her physically and psychologically damaged. Worse, Barr alleged
that her father molested her until she left home at the age of 17. Barr's parents, Helen
and Jerome Barr, denied all her allegations.
In 2011, Barr appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where she admitted making those accusations
was the worst thing she'd ever done. She didn't completely walk back her claims, however,
but said that using the word "incest" was a mistake.
However, when Barr appeared on Fox News' Hannity in 2018, she admitted she had a different
perspective about her incest allegations.
"Well now I have a whole different view of that."
Hannity asked her,
"Now you don't think you were sexually abused?
"Um, I think, I was emotionally abused."
Roseanne Barr may have been the star of one of America's most popular sitcoms, but she
was not exactly a calming presence behind the scenes. According to an oral history of
Roseanne in Entertainment Weekly, the already-tumultuous set became even more volatile with the arrival
of Tom Arnold, Barr's new husband, who was brought in as executive producer on the show.
Barr and Arnold stirred up tension with the show's writing staff by constantly rewriting
scripts. Arnold even said,
"The writers had a fear of me and her."
Among those writers were Joss Whedon and Amy Sherman-Palladino, who went on to create Buffy
the Vampire Slayer and Gilmore Girls, respectively. Sherman-Palladino remembered the writers each
being given numbered shirts to wear, so they could be referred to by their numbers and
not their names. She said of the experience,
"I was number 2. The writers did not think it was funny."
Barr, however, insisted the numbers were to, quote, "strip [writers] of their huge, colossal
self-entitlement. [...] I think they learned something from it."
While the behavior of Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold was typically erratic and extreme,
that was apparently just a warm-up for what took place when they split up in 1994. The
circumstances were characteristically bizarre, following the pair's weird fake "marriage"
to an assistant, which was described as a stunt or a prank by confused news outlets.
The breakup, reported the Post, came on the heels of an argument about this situation.
Barr responded by changing the locks on their production offices and their home, and hiring
security guards to prevent Arnold from entering. She also took a pair of scissors to Arnold's
credit cards.
As the Chicago Tribune reported, in Barr's divorce filing she claimed she'd been abused,
alleging that Arnold, quote, "hit me, struck me, has thrown objects at me, pinched me and
verbally abused me." Barr also asked that Arnold not be paid any alimony, and even sought
a restraining order against him.
The following year, Barr married Ben Thomas, whom she'd previously employed as her bodyguard.
They divorced in 2002, and share a son, Buck.
In 2010, The Hollywood Reporter shared the tragic news that Michael Blosil, the 18-year-old
son of singer and TV host Marie Osmond, took his own life. Years later, Osmond opened up
about her son's death while she was a co-host on daytime series The Talk, revealing her
son had been bullied prior to his death, and experienced severe depression associated with
his long-standing issues with substance abuse.
"He was bullied very heavily, right up until the time that he committed suicide."
The agony that Osmond went through coping with her son's suicide wasn't made any easier
when Roseanne Barr shared her thoughts in a blog post. While Barr's post has since been
deleted, the Proud Parenting website shared some excerpts of the post, as well as its
title, "Marie Osmond's Poor Gay Son Killed Himself."
Despite Osmond's declaration that her son was not gay, and that Barr had merely seized
upon a rumor, Barr claimed that the clash between his alleged homosexuality and his
Mormon faith was to blame for his suicide. In Barr's opinion, she wrote,
"[...] He had been told how wrong and how sick he was every day of his life by his church
and the people in it. Calling that 'depression' is a lie!"
Let it never be said that Roseanne Barr has not been ahead of the curve. Back in 2012,
she launched a bid to become president of the United States — a full four years before
it became clear that a celebrity television star could actually be a viable presidential
candidate. Barr announced her candidacy during an appearance on The Tonight Show, saying,
"I'm totally serious. I'm not for either party because they both suck and they're both a
bunch of criminals."
She said she was launching her own political party, the Green Tea Party.
As a Vulture retrospective on the campaign pointed out, Barr wound up running initially
as a Green Party candidate, and then for the newly-formed Peace and Freedom Party.
While Barr never ran much of a campaign, her political journey did form the basis for the
2015 documentary Roseanne for President! As a trailer for the doc made clear, Barr's platform
was all over the place, running the gamut from legalizing marijuana to reinstating the
guillotine as a form of capital punishment.
"Adults in a free country should be able to smoke a joint if they want to."
Roseanne Barr found herself targeted with a lawsuit when she weighed in on social media
about the shooting of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. That was
because she tweeted the home address of Zimmerman's parents, writing,
"If Zimmerman isn't arrested I'll rt his address again — maybe go 2 his house myself."
As a result, the couple sued Barr alleging the "intentional infliction of emotional distress."
According to the suit, Robert and Gladys Zimmerman described her tweet as a call for vigilante
justice, that they believed was intended to draw a lynch mob to their home.
"We've had an enormous amount of death threats."
When the case finally made it to court, the judge sided with Barr and threw the whole
thing out of court.
Back in 2018, an armed 15-year-old took the lives of 17 students and staff at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Several of the survivors of the horrific
massacre were spurred into activism, calling for tougher gun-control legislation. Among
those was Parkland student David Hogg, who lent his voice to the cause.
"Today is the beginning of spring, and tomorrow is the beginning of democracy."
Later that year, Hogg spoke at the "March For Our Lives" demonstration in Washington,
D.C., concluding his remarks by raising his clenched fist in the air. Online, some of
those who were opposed to Hogg's quest for tighter gun-control laws compared his gesture
of defiance to a Nazi salute; urban legend-busting website Snopes, however, shot that conspiracy
theory down entirely.
Yet that wasn't enough for Roseanne Barr, who apparently bought into the notion that
Hogg was a Nazi when she tagged him in a tweet that said, in all caps, "NAZI SALUTE." Barr
ultimately deleted her tweet, and issued another, claiming the image of Hogg she'd seen had
been doctored.
In the midst of the 2018 Roseanne revival, Roseanne Barr tweeted a bizarre claim that
then-President Donald Trump was breaking up child sex-trafficking rings, writing,
"President Trump has freed so many children held in bondage to pimps all over this world.
Hundreds each month. He has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere."
Of course, none of that was even remotely true, and Barr made her bizarre statement
even more clear when she subsequently tweeted,
"who is Q?"
Then she tried again, tweeting,
"tell Qanon to DM me in the nexxt 24 hours."
As it turned out, Barr had taken a deep dive into QAnon, whose adherents believe Trump
is devoted to bringing down an expansive cabal of blood-drinking pedophiles, composed of
Democratic politicians, global elites, and Hollywood stars. Unfortunately, Barr is far
from the only person who's been taken in by the bonkers conspiracy theory — so pervasive
has QAnon become that legitimate news service Reuters issued a fact check to counter a fake
news story reporting that Tom Hanks had been executed by a military tribunal due to his
alleged membership in the not-actually-real pedophile ring.
Anyone having watched this far should be clear that Roseanne Barr has been no stranger to
controversy throughout her decades-long showbiz career. As the Washington Post reported, however,
she crossed a line when she issued a disparaging tweet describing former Obama administration
adviser Valerie Jarrett as the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.
Barr's tweet was immediately decried as racist — even by her own TV daughter, with Roseanne
co-star Sara Gilbert responding vociferously via Twitter to deride Barr's comments as abhorrent.
Barr's first instinct was to balk at being called a racist, which she did by tweeting,
"Muslims r NOT a race."
Within hours of Barr's tweet, then-ABC president Channing Dungey — who, like Jarrett, is
African American — had taken decisive action. Dungey said in a statement,
"Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values,
and we have decided to cancel her show."
Too little and too late, Barr tweeted an apology, writing,
"I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad
joke about her politics and her looks."
From comeback queen to cancellation after a single tweet, Roseanne Barr emerged two
months later to attempt some damage control on Fox News' "Hannity."
"Well I've apologized a lot. It's been two months."
Admitting she felt sad that people thought her tweet was racist, she added,
"I made a mistake, obviously. It cost me everything, my life's work, everything."
Host Sean Hannity then encouraged Barr to apologize directly to Jarrett, and she did
— sort of.
"I’m so sorry that you thought I was racist."
The rest of the interview was wide-ranging, with Barr offering a lengthy explanation for
her tweet, but Hannity also highlighted something Barr has mentioned in past interviews — her
mental health. Hannity asked Barr about it, and she said she had dissociative identity
disorder.
"It's a loss of time."
She said she told ABC that she didn't feel she was in a good place, mentally, and said
she has been dependent on Ambien, a medication used to treat insomnia.
"Oh I told ABC, you guys, I'll go and get my meds checked."
Despite these admissions and her many apologies, Barr couldn't resist sneaking in a shot at
Jarrett in the midst of the interview.
"I'd tell her she's got to get a new haircut, I mean seriously."
While Roseanne Barr's infamous tweet led to the cancellation of Roseanne, that wasn't
the end of the sitcom family she brought to television all those years before. Less than
a month after axing Roseanne, ABC announced plans for a Barr-free spinoff, The Conners.
As ABC made crystal clear, Barr had no involvement in the new series, which was being produced
by Barr's former co-star Sara Gilbert, who played the youngest Conner daughter, Darlene.
However, reported Reuters, the debut of The Conners featured one more indignity for Barr,
when it was revealed that her character had died in an unfortunate manner.
"Roseanne ODed on opioids."
In March 2019, Barr spoke to the Washington Post to place the blame for her downfall squarely
on Gilbert for ABC's decision to cancel the show, saying,
"She destroyed the show and my life with that tweet."
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse, you can call the National
Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233. You can also find more information, resources,
and support at their website.