Roseanne Barr is not letting Jimmy Kimmel’s quick return to television go without comment.
In a new interview with NewsNation, the comedian blasted what she sees as a glaring hypocrisy: Kimmel was suspended for just six days over controversial remarks about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, while Barr’s career was effectively destroyed after her own scandal in 2018.
“It just shows how they think,” Barr said bluntly. “I got my whole life ruined, no forgiveness, all of my work stolen, and called a racist for time and eternity, for racially misgendering someone. It’s a double standard.”
Barr was fired from The Conners in 2018 despite high ratings after tweeting that former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett looked like a cross between the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”
Barr deleted the post and apologized, insisting she believed Jarrett was “a white woman from Iran.” But the fallout was swift and permanent—her career derailed, her reputation cemented in controversy.
What stings more, Barr says, is Kimmel’s role in it. She recalled him calling her a racist repeatedly, despite her insistence it was a mistake. “He called me a racist even though he himself appeared in blackface on their network many times,” she added, referencing Kimmel’s past impersonations of NBA star Karl Malone, for which he later apologized.
Kimmel, by contrast, was briefly taken off the air after blasting conservatives in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” Kimmel said on air—remarks that prompted ABC to suspend his show.
After a week of what Disney called “thoughtful conversations,” Kimmel returned on Tuesday night. His monologue acknowledged the controversy, but stopped short of an apology. “It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man,” Kimmel said emotionally, adding that the act was the result of “an obviously deeply disturbed individual.”
For Barr, the contrast could not be sharper. She was ousted permanently for one tweet, branded for life, while Kimmel—a host with a record that includes both blackface sketches and politically charged remarks—returns to applause after less than a week.
