Roseanne Barr has backtracked on almost three decades of her graphic claims that her father sexually abused her.
The disgraced actress claimed in 1991 that Jerome Barr forced her to ‘play with his penis’, would ‘play with himself’ in front of her and ‘molested her until she left home age 17’.
But in an interview on Fox News on Thursday, she made the startling retraction that her father’s abuse had not been sexual, but psychological only.
Roseanne Barr has backtracked on three decades of graphic claims that her father sexually abused her
In an interview on Fox News on Thursday, she made a startling retraction, admitting that her father’s abuse had not been sexual but psychological only
‘How old were you when you were sexually abused?’ Fox News host Sean Hannity asked in the interview – the first since Barr was fired from her rebooted sitcom over racist tweets.
‘I have a different view of that,’ she replied.
‘Now you don’t think you were sexually abused?’ Hannity asked.
‘Well, I think psychologically,’ Barr says. ‘Everybody in my whole family is messed up.’
Barr’s mother Helen and father Jerome always denied the shocking incest claims. He died from a heart attack in Nevada in 2001.
The disgraced actress claimed in 1991 that her Jerome Barr forced her to ‘play with his penis’, would ‘play with himself’ in front of her and ‘molested her until she left home age 17’
Though often repeated since, it was in 1991 at the height of her sitcom on the cover of People magazine, where Barr first made the astonishing allegations against her parents.
‘Keeping the secret of incest has taken all my energy and courage for 38 years,’ she said, claiming that repressed memories had come flooding back after her then-husband Tom Arnold revealed he’d been molested as a child.
‘My mother abused me from the time I was an infant until I was six or seven years old,’ Roseanne claimed, describing one occasion where she said her mother held her under a pillow. ‘She did lots of lurid things. She hurt me psychologically and physically.’
‘My father molested me until I left home at age 17,’ she continued.
‘He constantly put his hands all over me. He forced me to sit on his lap, to cuddle with him, to play with his penis in the bathtub. He did grotesque and disgusting things: He used to chase me with his excrement and try to put it on my head. He’d lie on the floor playing with himself. It was the most disgusting thing you can ever imagine.’
Barr (pictured aged eight) claimed she was psychologically abused by her mother and sexually abused by her father – until her latest retraction
Barr said she was going public with the accusations because ‘incest and child abuse thrive in darkness.’
Shortly after, Helen and Jerome Barr appeared on TV where they strenuously denied the claims – even taking a lie detector test which sided with their denials.
On an appearance on CBS This Morning in 1991, he said: ‘I never touched my daughter. I never had any incestuous relationship with her.’
Jerome said he had no idea why Roseanne would make such allegations, adding: ‘We’re crushed.’
Barr’s sister Geraldine, in a 1994 memoir titled My Sister Roseanne, denied the accusation and defended their parents, though she said she had forgiven her sister.
The comedian also mentioned the claims in her second autobiography, My Lives, released in 1994, where she described a childhood marred by physical and sexual abuse by her father.
Roseanne Barr’s mother Helen appears to have been able to get over the accusations, and they were pictured together backstage at ‘After Midnight’ on Broadway in 2014
But in her 2011 memoir, Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm, she apologized for using the word ‘incest’ to describe the abuse, saying she was mistaken to use the word.
In an Oprah appearance to promote the book in 2011, she called the allegations ‘the worst thing I’ve ever done’ and ‘the biggest mistake that I’ve ever made.’
When asked whether she meant calling ‘calling it incest or going public?’, Barr said she regretted both.
‘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.’
She didn’t go as far as to say the sexual abuse didn’t occur, but said she was ‘mistaken to use the word incest.’
‘But I can’t really think of another word, and when I do, I’ll use it,’ she told Oprah.
Barr was on Hannity’s show on Thursday in the wake of her racist tweet that got her hit ABC show (pictured) cancelled two months ago
The 65-year-old made an on-air apology to former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, who is African American
Barr received widespread criticism after she tweeted that Jarrett looked like the ‘Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby’
Barr was on Hannity’s show on Thursday in the wake of her racist tweet that got her hit ABC show cancelled two months ago.
The 65-year-old made an on-air apology to former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, who is African American, and who Barr compared to a child of Planet of the Apes.
The sitcom star once again claimed she believed Jarrett was white when she posted the tweet, and apologized to Jarrett – before immediately insulting her haircut.
‘I’m so sorry that you thought I was racist,’ Barr finally relented. ‘And that you thought my tweet was racist. Because it wasn’t, it was political.’
‘She’s gotta get a new haircut,’ Barr added. ‘I mean, seriously, she needs a new haircut.’
The comedian, who lost millions after her show was cancelled, insisted throughout the interview that her tweet about Jarrett was political, not racist.
‘Her skin tone is like mine,’ Barr told Hannity during the interview. ‘I’m brown.’
‘I didn’t know she was African-American, I assumed she was from Iran.’
Barr insisted that she was ‘shocked’ so many people considered her tweet to be ‘racial when it was political’.
‘That was a hard one to take,’ she said. ‘Then everybody started saying I was a racist which is like the worst thing you could call a Jewish person, especially one like me who grew up with Holocaust survivors.’