Roseanne Barr launched an expletive-laden tirade against former "Roseanne" co-star Michael Fishman on a podcast, calling him a "brainwashed bigot" after he said the 2018 reboot was "rightfully canceled."
Barr appeared on the "Can't Be Censored" podcast for a new interview in which she was asked about Fishman's August remarks. Fishman, who played D.J. Conner on the original sitcom and its short-lived revival, had posted an Instagram video pushing back on claims the reboot's cancellation was driven by "woke crap." He called the cancellation justified and accused defenders of Barr's infamous 2018 tweet of "perpetuating a lie."
Barr did not hold back. She accused Fishman of never bothering to understand what she actually wrote, and she framed the entire dispute as a case of a former colleague cashing in on the controversy while refusing to hear her side of the story.
The confrontation traces back to May 2018, when ABC canceled the "Roseanne" reboot after Barr posted a tweet reading "muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj", a reference to Valerie Jarrett, an advisor to Barack Obama. The tweet was widely condemned as a racial attack on Jarrett, who is Black. ABC moved quickly, pulling the show and launching a spinoff, "The Conners," without Barr. The network explained her character's absence through an off-screen death.
Barr has long disputed the racist-intent reading of the tweet. She claims "Planet of the Apes" was a nickname she used to describe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and that the tweet was a reference to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, not Jarrett's race. Whether anyone finds that explanation persuasive, Barr insists she has offered it repeatedly. On the podcast, she said she has explained her meaning "10,000 times for nine years on the Internet" and accused Fishman of never taking the time to listen.
Variety reported on the full exchange. Barr told the podcast:
"He f***ing doesn't even f***ing know what I said, even though I've explained it 10,000 times for nine years on the Internet. He hasn't even taken the time to listen to what I say because he's a bigot. And he's a brainwashed bigot."
She escalated from there, telling Fishman in absentia to "go and f*** yourself and stay f***ed 'till the day you die." She called him "an ignoramus and a bigot" and accused him of parroting the "Democratic Party platform" without any "geopolitical context whatsoever."
Then came the sharpest personal jab. Barr claimed she was the sole reason Fishman appeared in the reboot at all:
"You think I said Black people look like monkeys. Go f*** yourself, you little f***ing worm. And I'm glad they fired you because I was the only reason you were ever on that show. They wanted to get rid of you in the reboot and I made them take you back."
That claim, that producers wanted to cut Fishman from the revival and Barr personally intervened, has not been independently confirmed. But Barr delivered it as a settled fact, and it added a layer of personal grievance to an already bitter exchange.
Fishman's August Instagram video was itself a departure. For years after the cancellation, he had largely avoided relitigating the controversy in public. At the time of the original 2018 fallout, he condemned Barr's post and called her comments "reprehensible and intolerable." Barr responded by posting, "You throw me under the bus."
But in August, Fishman posted a video saying he was done turning the other cheek. He told followers he fields "ignorant and inaccurate comments daily" and that after eight years, silence was not working. His message was direct:
"We are perpetuating a lie, and people are using a political smokescreen to justify the indefensible... Those justifications, they're leading to real consequences, real crimes, situations like Trey Reed and Tasha Fortune, because dehumanizing people is never a joke."
He added: "Sadly, in this case, there was no joke. And the show was rightfully canceled."
Fishman referenced two individuals, Trey Reed and Tasha Fortune, as examples of real-world harm, but no further detail about who they are or what incidents he was describing appeared in the reporting. Fox News noted that Fishman also said he was "living something publicly that a lot of you have been navigating privately," framing his experience as part of a broader cultural reckoning.
The feud underscores how completely the "Roseanne" universe fractured after 2018. Barr has confirmed she has no contact with any of her former co-stars. She also turned down an offer to appear as a ghost on "The Conners," the spinoff that ran for seven seasons on ABC without her.
Fishman himself did not survive the spinoff's full run. He reprised D.J. Conner for four seasons of "The Conners" before learning in 2022 that he would not return for season five. "I was told I would not be returning for season 5," Fishman said at the time. ABC never publicly explained the decision.
So both Barr and Fishman ended up on the outside of the franchise they helped build, Barr by cancellation, Fishman by a quieter exit nobody bothered to explain. That shared displacement makes the bitterness between them all the more pointed. Neither one is speaking from a position of industry strength. They are fighting over the meaning of a show that moved on without both of them.
Strip away the profanity and the personal insults, and the underlying dispute is the same one that played out in 2018. Barr says her tweet was a political reference misread by people who never cared to hear her explanation. Fishman says the tweet was indefensible and the cancellation was the right call. Neither has budged.
Barr frames the entire episode as an example of political persecution, a comedian punished for a joke that was deliberately misinterpreted by an industry aligned with the Democratic Party. Fishman frames it as accountability for language that dehumanizes people and leads to real harm. Both are dug in. Both claim the other refuses to engage honestly.
What remains unresolved is whether Barr's explanation of the tweet, that "Planet of the Apes" referred to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Iran nuclear deal, holds up on its own terms, or whether it is a retroactive reframing of a post that read, on its face, as a racial comparison directed at a specific Black woman. Barr insists the context was always there. Her critics, Fishman included, say the plain text speaks for itself.
The entertainment industry moved on years ago. ABC made its decision in 2018 and never looked back. "The Conners" ran its course. Barr found a new audience on podcasts and alternative media platforms. Fishman largely stayed quiet until August.
Now both are talking again, and neither is saying anything new, just saying it louder.
When the only thing left to fight over is who gets to define a controversy from eight years ago, the argument says more about the people still having it than about the controversy itself.
