Now that Roseanne’s set to re-reboot without its disgraced star, Roseanne Barr appears to be embarking on a bit of an apology tour. On Sunday, podcaster Rabbi Shmuley Boteach released an interview he conducted with Barr a day after ABC fired her for comparing former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett to an “ape” in a tweet. “I don’t want to run off and blather on with excuses,” Barr told Boteach, through tears. She then proceeded to roll out a series of excuses, which included insisting she was not racist, claiming her tweet “didn’t mean what they think I meant,” and making a classic non-apology to anyone who “felt offended,” ABC, I beg of you, put this woman on permanent mute.
According to Variety, Barr told Boteach she “never would have wittingly called any black person…a monkey,” despite having done just that both with the Jarrett tweet and in 2013, when she tweeted that former national security advisor Susan Rice was “a man with big swinging ape balls.”
Per Barr:
It’s really hard to say this but, I didn’t mean what they think I meant. And that’s what’s so painful. But I have to face that it hurt people. When you hurt people even unwillingly there’s no excuse. I don’t want to run off and blather on with excuses.
Cue the excuses:
I have black children in my family. I can’t, I can’t let ‘em say these things about that, after thirty years of my putting my family and my health and my livelihood at risk to stand up for people. I’m a lot of things, a loud mouth and all that stuff.
She is indeed a lot of things. Including a racist.
I’m not stupid, for God’s sake. I never would have wittingly called any black person, [I would never had said] they are a monkey. I just wouldn’t do that. I didn’t do that. People think that I did that and it just kills me. I didn’t do that. And if they do think that, I’m just so sorry that I was so unclear and stupid. I’m very sorry. But I don’t think that and I would never do that. I have loved ones who are African-American, and I just can’t stand it.
And, of course, there was the Apology to Those Who Were Offended:
I apologize to anyone who thought, or felt offended and who thought that I meant something that I, in fact, did not mean. It was my own ignorance, and there’s no excuse for that ignorance.
Barr did, in fact, offer Boteach her now-world famous Ambien Defense, claiming she was “impaired” when she wrote the tweet. Now, she laments that she is a “hate magnet,” though considering the slew of racist and Islamophobic tweets she’s spewed over the years—calling Huma Abedin a “jew hater,” for instance, and inexplicably tweeting about “Islamic rape pedo culture,”— that label has been affixed to her for some time. Still, this time she is truly sorry—sorry that the Roseanne reboot’s cancellation has cost her about $250K-per-episode.
Here’s Boteach’s interview, if you feel the need to listen to it:
Following the death of Roseanne, ABC has decided to launch a spinoff potentially dubbed The Conners, which would star John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, and Sara Gilbert. It is set to premiere in the fall, provided the cast can stay off sleeping medication in the meantime.