Scandal favorite: Here's a look at Roseanne Barr's biggest controversies over the years
Roseanne Barr is not someone who shies away from speaking her mind and sometimes her comments don't find a very forgiving audience. The actress made news waves on Tuesday after one of her extremely racist tweets went viral over the Internet, which in turn, resulted in ABC canceling the highly rated Roseanne reboot just hours later.
Roseanne's tweet about Barack Obama's former White House adviser Valerie Jarrett angered a lot of people, including the network executives and some of her own co-stars as well. However, Roseanne is no stranger to controversies and has seen a lot of turmoil in the past several years because of her outspokenness. This time, however, it seems she may have bitten off more than she could chew as she had to rush to do damage control after her viral tweets got her severe backlash. She apologized for her remarks and even said she was quitting Twitter.
And while we are at those tweets, here's a look at some of the biggest controversies that the 65-year-old comedian has either unapologetically ignited or been a massive part of in the past several years.
Roseanne posing as Hitler for Heeb magazine
Born into a Jewish family, Roseanne created quite a stir in the media in 2009 when she dressed up as Adolf Hitler in a photo shoot for Heeb magazine, which is a Jewish satirical publication. The pictures show the actress wearing a mustache and eating burnt gingerbread “Jew cookies” out of the oven.
When the pictures sparked tremendous outrage, in a statement, the magazine defended it, saying, "Heeb is a satirical Jewish culture magazine that interrogates stereotypes and ideas (hopefully in creative ways) that many hold sacred in order to represent the complex and nuanced perspectives that many Jews have about their identities."
Roseanne too remained unapologetic on the issue, which she spoke of in great detail on an interview on an episode of The Green Room with Paul Provenza. "It really pissed me off," she said of the backlash.
"Because they were like 'you’re making fun of the people in the ovens,' but I’m not making fun of people in the ovens. ... There’s another, deeper layer to it. You know just the everyday. Moving off this Holocaust. There’s been about fifty of them since then. That’s what I’m kind of trying to say. Is like, Jesus Christ it’s so fu**ing every day now, holocausts, it’s like baking cookies."
Roseanne claiming her parents sexually abused her
In the year 1991, while she was standing in front of an audience of 1,000 at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church in Denver, Roseanne made the claim that she had been sexually abused by her parents.
“My name is Roseanne,” she said, “and I am an incest survivor.”
At the time, her parents, Helen and Jerome Barr, denied all the allegations put onto them by their daughter through their attorney. However, in a surprising move, Roseanne took back all her allegations against her parents in a conversation with Oprah Winfrey on her show.
“I think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “It’s the biggest mistake that I’ve ever made.”
“Calling it incest?” Oprah asked. “Or going public?”
“Well, both of those things,” she replied. “I was in a very unhappy relationship. I was prescribed numerous psychiatric drugs, incredible mixtures of psychiatric drugs to deal with the fact that I had — and still in some ways have and always will have — some mental illness. And [with] the drugs and the combination of drugs that I was given — which were some strong, strong drugs — I totally lost touch with reality in a big, big way.
Roseanne attacked Parkland student activist David Hogg
In March 2018, Roseanne sparked off another controversy when she appeared to promote a far-right conspiracy theory about Parkland shooting student-activist David Hogg. At the time, she tweeted "NAZI SALUTE" as a response to a Twitter user who tagged Hogg in a tweet. The particular tweet was in reference to a theory which claimed that Hogg was the one to raise a Nazi salute at a March for Our Lives rally.
Roseanne slammed Marie Osmond after Osmond's son Michael's suicide
In March 2010, Roseanne took the help of her blog to call out Marie Osmond, whose son, Michael, had committed suicide in 2009 at 18. In her blog, she wrote, "Marie Osmond’s Poor Gay Son Killed Himself," after it was revealed that Osmond has always denied her son being homosexual.
"He had been told how wrong and how sick he was every day of his life by his church and the people in it," Roseanne claimed. "Calling that 'depression' is a lie! Yet the Osmonds still talk lovingly about their church, saying nothing about its extremely anti-gay Crusade. Marie also has a gay daughter! Hey, I want her and all the gay kids in the world to know that they are just fine being gay and that they deserve love and respect instead of insults and rebuke! I have gay people in my family and my circle of friends and I am kicking bigot a** and taking names!”
However, Roseanne somehow later learned from her mistakes and apologized to Osmond in another blog post of hers. "I am sorry to have hurt Marie Osmond, who is the most open-minded person in her whole family," she said.
"I really apologize to her. I thought about waiting to say what I had to say, but then I thought that perhaps there was no better time to add to the conversations in America about homophobia. ... Anyway, I apologize again for having added to another mother’s pain and have asked myself if I should have said nothing at all, or waited a while to say what I said. I really don’t know. I think it’s good to get people talking about being more aware of what we accept, and I know that my comments got people talking."
Roseanne tweeted out George Zimmerman's parents' home address
Just a month after Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by police officer George Zimmerman, Roseanne retweeted a tweet which contained the home address of the guilty police officer's parents.
She also tweeted some more messages, which have since been deleted, where she said, “If Zimmerman isn’t arrested I’ll rt his address again — maybe go 2 his house myself.”
In the end, Zimmerman's parents Robert and Glady did sue Roseanne for her gross invasion of privacy, but the case was thrown out in 2015.
And as recent as Sunday night, Roseanne also took the time to call out Chelsea Clinton, accusing her of being married to one of billionaire George Soros' nephews. In a tweet of her own, Clinton responded to Roseanne clarifying the glaring mistake the actress made in her allegations, for which the comedian later issued an apology.
