Just one month after posting a tweet that effectively ended her TV career, Roseanne Barr has come out of hiding to give her first interview.
Speaking to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s podcast, Barr says, “It’s really hard to say this, but I didn’t mean what they think I meant.”
“I don’t want to run off and blather on with excuses, but I apologise 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,” she continued.
As she started to tear up, she adds “I definitely feel remorse.”
“I’m a lot of things, I’m a loud mouth and all that stuff, but I’m not stupid, for God’s sake,” Barr tearfully told Boteach. “I never would have wittingly called any black person…a monkey.”
She, once again, brought up the medication excuse, saying that she was “impaired” when she fired off the tweet.
When asked if she regretted what happened, she emotionally said:
“I horribly regret it. Are you kidding? I lost everything, and I regretted it before I lost everything.”
She went on to reveal that when the network hired her, they “they asked me to get off Twitter, because I’m always saying things.”
“I ask people if you look at my tweet don’t defend me. I’ve done something egregious and I don’t want to be defended. I don’t want to get any more racism going from what I did, I don’t want that. I don’t want to be defended.”
Although the interview went live in the US on Sunday, The Blast revealed that it actually took place just two days after the show’s cancellation. Since that time, the ABC has announced plans to create a spinoff series centered around the Conner family, sans Roseanne.
The 10 episode, straight-to-series project is tentatively titled The Conners and according to a press release from ABC, it will find the family “forced to face the daily struggles of life in Lanford in a way they never have before” following “a sudden turn of events.”
