Roseanne Barr claims ABC broke her contract by firing her the same day she posted her controversial tweet, despite a contract agreement stating she had ’24 hours to correct any mistakes’ she made on Twitter.
Barr revealed the stipulation in her contract that protected her ‘from getting in trouble with tweets’ in a tell-all interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity on Thursday.
She said ABC asked her to get rid of her Twitter account during talks about launching the reboot, but she defended it as a platform for her activism.
Roseanne Barr claims ABC broke her contract which guaranteed her ’24 hours to correct any mistakes’, in an interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday evening
Barr sat down with the Fox News host for her first interview appearance following her racist tweet and the axing of her show’s reboot
She said: ‘I want to tell you this. I walked away from that show despite the fact I had a contract that protected me from getting in trouble with tweets’
‘I said in the beginning I will never stop defending Israel and the Jewish people. That’s me. I was raised that way. It’s very important to me,’ she said.
‘So they said, okay. Anyway, I did what I did.’
ABC called her soon after her tweet saying Obama’s former adviser Valerie Jarrett looked like ‘Muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes had a baby’ began making waves on the internet.
‘Then they called me. They said what possible excuse could you have for this unforgivable and egregious tweet? I said — what do you mean exactly?’ she said.
The comedian said she was completely shocked by the phone call and in fact was clueless to controversy her tweet was stirring in the first place.
‘You didn’t know?’ Hannity asked.
She was fired on May 29, the same day she tweeted that Obama’s former adviser Valerie Jarrett looked like ‘Muslim Brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby’, despite a contract that allowed her ’24 hours to correct any mistakes’
Speaking on The View, Jarrett seemed unperturbed by the tweet saying: ‘In all seriousness…I’m fine. I am just fine.’
‘No, you could have knocked me over with a feather. My boyfriend saw it. I thought she was Middle Eastern,’ she said.
She was fired on May 29 in light of her tweet, however Barr claims that her termination broke her contract.
‘I want to tell you this. I walked away from that show despite the fact I had a contract that protected me from getting in trouble with tweets,’ she said.
She explained that under her contract she had ’24 hours to correct any mistakes’.
She posted the jabbing tweet at 2:45am on May 29. After she came under fire for it, she deleted the tweet. But the damage was done and ABC canceled her eponymous show and Barr was fired just hours later.
The actress adds that she was prevented from clearing her name.
‘I asked them to let me go on The View and other shows and explain and correct that I didn’t say what they were putting out there. They said no,’ Barr said.
Barr said she tried to clear the air by going on The View to quell the Twitter controversy, but was denied from doing so
She added that she walked away from the show without causing a fight so that staff and cast members on the show wouldn’t lose their jobs
Instead of fighting, Barr told Hannity that she walked away because she didn’t want staff and cast members on the show to lose their job and she even signed for the show to continue without her.
‘I am for working people. I could fight this. No, it’s going to be part of the repentance. I will just walk away,’ she said.
When she was later asked if she’s still on Twitter Barr said: ‘My kids took it away from me.’
Hannity pointed out she could get another phone, to which she smiled and said ‘Yes, I know’. She has been active on Twitter following the May 29 tweet.
Speaking on the tweet she said: ‘I made a mistake, obviously. It cost me everything. My life’s work. Everything. I made a mistake. I have paid the price for it. No, I didn’t know — like a lot of Americans including a lot of people of all times, they didn’t know either.’