The Only Recap Of Roseanne Barr's Downfall You Need

Roseanne Barr's life, career, and downfall have reflected the past four decades of American culture and politics in fascinating ways. She has always been an unlikely example of stardom, with her work focusing on realistic issues of class and labor while her image defied traditional beauty standards, all in an era defined by gloss, glamour, and greed. Despite this, Barr was one of the most beloved stars of the '80s and '90s, with her eponymous show garnering massive ratings and acclaim. "Roseanne," was one of the five most-watched shows for each of its first six seasons, with episodes frequently garnering more than 30 million viewers. It also earned 14 Golden Globe nominations and 27 Primetime Emmy Award nominations, setting a very high bar for Barr, which she would never reach again.

In the intervening years between the end of the show's original run in 1997 and its single-season revival in 2018, Barr experienced a public transformation and became infamous on-screen and off. Courting controversy was always part of her image, though, and American culture was fairly different from what it would become with the advent of social media, online outrage, and Trumpian politics. So while Barr had infamous moments that affected her career, nothing came close to the full-on cancellation she experienced in 2018 and her subsequent MAGA-adjacent downfall, which was broadly publicized for all to see, sometimes from Barr's own fingertips.

It's important to note from the outset that Roseanne Barr has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, personal traumas, and believes her parents sexually abused her. In 1994, at the height of her TV series "Roseanne," Barr published "My Lives," an incredible memoir that detailed her dissociative identity disorder. Barr wrote about her different personalities (Baby, Cindy, Susan, Joey, Heather, ONE, Vangie, Bambi, Piggy, Martha, and others), which she referred to as "a basic correction in evolution that needed to be made to allow for my survival" after an abusive childhood. She wrote about her "mother's sadism, and how much abuse she put me through," recalling, "Once, she pulled a kitchen knife on me and threatened to kill me if I didn't get to my grandma's house real quick. When I was three or four, she liked to have me strike nude poses with her in various sexual positions."

"Every day is a struggle to remember, to hold on, to choose to live," Barr wrote. "I am an overweight overachiever with a few dandy compulsive-obsessive disorders and a little problem with self-mutilation ..." The truth about Roseanne Barr is crucial to keep in mind when reading about some of her choices and statements, as it grounds all historicizing with empathy. Her "downfall" is very much related to her lifelong psychological issues, something she has been vocal and vulnerable about.

The "Roseanne" era brought Roseanne Barr unimaginable success. In 1989, she was on more magazine covers in one single year than anyone before her, and by the end of "Roseanne," she was making $21 million a year, making her the second-highest-paid woman in show business (just behind Oprah Winfrey). However, by the end of the series, she was seen as a caricature of herself, going from working-class "Domestic Goddess" to a Hollywood diva. She had forced the writers of "Roseanne" to wear numbered T-shirts and referred to them only by their numbers. The final season of the series was its biggest betrayal, with the Conner family winning the lottery and becoming class traitors. For many, Barr had shed the last of her proletariat bona fides.

"Roseanne" had gone from the most-watched TV show to number 35 in the ratings in that final season. Barr's reputation in the industry had fallen just as much as her show's ratings. A TV executive who worked with Barr told The Sun, "I grew to despise Roseanne because of the nasty s*** she did to people for no reason — and it was always the people on lower pay – the defenseless and powerless people. She was a yeller — she would yell at people, especially to people she didn't recognise, and that's scary when you're exhibiting this extreme diva behaviour to people who didn't do anything."

When "Roseanne" initially ended in 1997, Roseanne Barr found herself unmoored when considering her next career move. Due to her behavior and the downfall of her show, many people simply weren't interested in what she would do next. Michael and Roger King of King World Productions, however, thought differently, believing they could still have a hit with Barr in a new format — a traditional talk show. Beginning in 1998, Barr hosted "The Roseanne Show," which suffered the same on-set difficulties as "Roseanne." There were immediate red flags, with Barr demanding the King brothers buy her a house on top of her $5 million salary. This hardly placated her bullying behavior, especially when the negative reviews started.

"It wouldn't be unusual for Roseanne to call one department, swearing about the crew and lack of support from the King brothers, and demeaning the work that was trying to be done to give her positive press," one source told Us Weekly. "She would tell us the infomercial she was watching was better than her show and that we were ruining her life." Her talk show came to a quiet end in 2000.

A few years after "The Roseanne Show" failed, Roseanne Barr attempted "The Real Roseanne Show." Barr seemed positioned to succeed with a unique comeback, a 2003 cooking show for ABC Family called "Domestic Goddess" preceded by "The Real Roseanne Show" on ABC, a related reality series about Barr's life as she prepared to make the cooking show. The finale of that reality show was meant to dovetail with the premiere of the cooking show. It all fell apart, however, with "Domestic Goddess" being canceled before it ever aired. That was due to a variety of factors, from the earlier reality series' poor ratings and an absolute mess of a cooking pilot, which even Barr said wasn't fit to air, though Barr blamed it on an emergency hysterectomy. "I had a choice between continuing on or having an organ removed," said Barr. "I immediately chose having an organ removed."

Barr later confessed, according to TV Guide, that the hysterectomy wasn't to blame, saying reality TV "was too hard. It was all a big, big mess." Barr admitted that "The Real Roseanne Show" was "totally faked. "They had me doing things on that show that I never do in real life — like get out of bed and shower and exercise and talk to people." So much for her big comeback. Barr would spend the next several years oscillating between stand-up comedy, guest spots on TV shows, and hosting Los Angeles radio shows on KCAA and KPFK-FM.

Roseanne Barr has been politically outspoken long before her radio shows (which aired on and off between 2007 and 2013), and "Roseanne" was one of the rare overtly political and class-conscious family sitcoms. The problem is that Barr's politics (and political humor) is either easily misunderstood or just confoundingly confused. For instance, Barr dressed up as Adolf Hitler for a 2009 photoshoot with Heeb, which featured her taking a tray of "burnt gingerbread Jew cookies" out of the oven. The author of that Heeb article, "That Oven Feelin'," wrote of "the theory (her own) that she may in fact be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, whom she has requested to be dressed as for her Heeb photo shoot."

Barr defended her Hitler drag in a variety of ways on her blog at the time, writing (per The Jewish Chronicle), "Hitler served the German industrialists who put him in power, as if he were their little housefrau. When they thought they could turn a buck by cooking and gassing their minority groups, he helped set up their lines of federal credit to do so. I thought that Hitler in drag making Jew cookies was a very accurate way of depicting the whole German Gestalt." Barr also wrote, "There is so much antisemitism in this world, it's not even funny. It is as everyday as baking cookies. Ignorance is not bliss. Recalling the horrors of the holocaust will not deflect or divert it, as many Jewish people think."

Roseanne Barr's politics became less satirical (if not more serious) when she announced her candidacy for president of the United States in 2011. The announcement came as a half-joke while Barr was guest hosting Joy Behar's HLN talk show and had documentarian Michael Moore as a guest. "Some of you need to run for office," Moore said on the program, and was taken aback when Barr replied, "I'm running! I'm running for president of the United States on behalf of the tax-paying people. I'm thinkin' about it, anyway — on this Red Bull." That was on March 29, 2011; on August 5 of that year, Barr made her candidacy official during an appearance on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." She filed with the Federal Election Commission as a Green Party candidate, later losing the party's nomination to Jill Stein.

Barr then ran for president with the Peace and Freedom Party, with Cindy Sheehan as her running mate. However, some of Barr's comments throughout her campaign led to Sheehan requesting her name be removed from the ticket. In one instance, Barr joined Occupy Wall Street protesters and stated that she would bring back the guillotine as capital punishment for the "worst of the worst of the guilty," which included bankers with more than $100 million in personal wealth. "If they're unable to live on that amount, they should go to re-education camps. And if that doesn't work, they should be beheaded," Barr said, according to ABC.

Roseanne Barr tried politics and was terrible at it, with her campaign derailed by Barr's attacks on the Green Party's Jill Stein. In October 2012, she took to X, a platform that has become the kryptonite to Barr and any public figure with mental health issues, to criticize Stein's support of trans issues. There she wrote (per The Advocate), "I'm sorry, but a d*** means you're a man to me. Maybe I'm old and out of it, but I can't go there ... Women do not want your penises forced in their faces or in our private bathrooms."

This was a seminal moment in Roseanne Barr's downfall, occurring as it did at the intersection of X and anti-trans ideology. Despite her often leftist (or at least pro-labor) roots, Barr had begun a rightward shift which ultimately led her into the arms of MAGA. It was initiated by the issue of trans rights, which Barr first addressed in her 2011 book, "Roseannarchy." In it, she wrote (per Trans Advocate), "Then the Transgendered versus the Butch D*** wars started — to see two of those folks fighting about being female was quite an eye-opener for me." Suffice it to say, Barr's presidential run didn't pan out, not that she exactly wanted it to. "It makes me feel extremely nervous that I'm doing this ... like I'm f***ng up my whole career," she stated in a cash-out documentary about the experience, "Roseanne for President!"

Outside politics, Roseanne Barr's career frequently faltered throughout the 2010s. In 2012, she tried to relaunch her TV career with "Downwardly Mobile," a sitcom that would reunite her with friend and "Roseanne" star John Goodman (one of the few remaining celebrities who could stand Roseanne), but NBC ultimately passed on the show. Barr claimed that her progressive politics made the show seem too polarizing, telling The Observer, "How they figure what is polarizing blows my mind. It really has blown my mind. I guess it went back to the sponsors on the East Coast and some of them are — they don't like me no matter what I do and they don't like the things I say, so it's kind of like blacklisting or something."

Barr later attempted to create an NBC sitcom with "Nurse Jackie" co-creator Linda Wallem, but that also fell apart. Barr took to X (of course) to vent her dissatisfaction with the process, writing (per Deadline), "[The] showrunner disappeared for seven weeks — never returned any calls from me ... They had less than no interest in including me in the development of a show that was built on 'my brand'. It was horrible." The failure of this and "Downwardly Mobile" led Barr to announce in 2013, "I am done being mentally tortured — I quit ... I'm never going to work in television again. I'm never going to even attempt it."

Without stardom or artistic achievements to rest her laurels on, fewer people had any incentive to defend Roseanne Barr's online behavior and frequently bizarre decisions throughout the 2010s. Her public image had worsened at the start of the decade when she went on Oprah Winfrey's show and stated she was actually wrong about her incest claims and allegations of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents. She told Winfrey (per The Daily Express), "I wish that some of the people around me or one of them had said, 'Roseanne, you really should wait until your therapy's completely over (before) you go public.' ... I wish I had done everything that I did in a different way."

Barr explained her supposedly false allegations by saying, "I was in a very unhappy relationship and I was prescribed numerous psychiatric drugs ... to deal with the fact that I had some mental illness ... I totally lost touch with reality ... I didn't know what the truth was... I just wanted to drop a bomb on my family." Her explanation served as a sort of thesis statement to Barr's unfortunate downfall in general, and foreshadowed her future social media posts, which were written under the influence of the prescription drug Ambien.

Despite the shady things Roseanne Barr has said, the election of President Donald Trump signaled to many studios and executives that there was interest in Barr's style of humor and the working-class artifice of "Roseanne." In fact, news of a new, tenth season of the show first surfaced just a few months after Trump's 2017 inauguration. The revival premiered on March 27, 2018, garnering a sizable audience of more than 18 million live viewers (with an additional 8.8 million viewers over the next three days). It seemed like Barr had finally done it — after so many embarrassments, failures, and fits and starts, she had actually made a comeback. Just two months later, "Roseanne" was canceled, and Barr was canceled by the general public.

Like many of Barr's problems over the past 15 years, it all started on X. At two in the morning on May 28, 2018, Barr replied to a post about Valerie Jarrett (a longtime senior adviser to Barack Obama) by writing, "Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj." The message was seen as a racist comment on Jarrett, and remains one of the simplest career-destroying sentences in history. Within the day, ABC had distanced itself from Barr and canceled her show, and she faced the online rage machine. While stories of "cancel culture" are often overblown and misleading, this was one of the rare instances where the effects were real and immediate.

Roseanne Barr apologized about 30 minutes after her Valerie Jarrett "joke," writing, "I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste." Barr later blamed her late-night posting on the prescription drug Ambien, writing on X (per The New York Times), "It was two in the morning and I was Ambien tweeting ... I made a mistake I wish I hadn't." The makers of Ambien, Sanofi U.S., posted their own attempt at a joke on X, writing, "While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication."

Barr's attempts to explain her racist post didn't help anything. She temporarily left X, something she had done ever since 2009 when she called the platform a "s*** heap" (per Heeb). On Dec. 29, 2017, amidst a #BoycottRoseanne campaign on X, she announced her exit by writing (per TV Guide), "I retire right now. I've had enough. bye!" She stated in early 2018 that her children had taken away her social media accounts, stating in agreement (per The New York Times), "I didn't want it to overshadow the show ... I think it's the time to close ranks and see an end to 'hatriotism' in this country." So much for that.

Canceled from Hollywood and ostracized by the liberals who had long supported her, Roseanne Barr found herself turning further and further to the right-wing fringe. This shift began earlier in the decade with Barr's anti-trans views and was already solidified with Barr's vocal support of the newly elected Donald Trump in 2016. Trump had personally called Barr in 2018 after the revival of "Roseanne" premiered, congratulating her on its ratings. With nothing left to lose, Barr embraced the right-wing fringe, often sounding like Trump himself with rants about witch-burning and fake news.

The coronavirus pandemic further radicalized Barr, aligning her with other like-minded conspiracy theorists. "I think they're just trying to get rid of all my generation," Barr rambled during a conversation with Norm Macdonald in April 2020, per The Hollywood Reporter. Barr's conspiracy theories have been wide-ranging. In July 2024, during the presidency of Joe Biden, Barr told Newsmax (per Mediaite), "The president is Obama, and he's in his third term now, and he'll be running for his fourth term." Later that year, Barr told Tucker Carlson (per The New Republic) that Democrats "eat babies," adding, "That is not bulls***, it's true. It's not just the dogs and the cats. They are full-on vampires, and everybody still thinks I'm crazy. But I'm not crazy. They're full-on vampires. They love the taste of human flesh, and they drink human blood. They do."

Roseanne Barr landed in hot water again after appearing on Theo Von's podcast "This Past Weekend," where her comments made YouTube remove the video for hate speech. This was pretty ironic considering that, in the interview, Barr satirically attacked online platforms such as YouTube for censoring or removing misinformation related to the 2020 election. Barr believed the election to be "rigged," but sarcastically spoke as if it wasn't, mockingly stating, "There's such a thing as the truth and facts, and we have to stick to them." She continued (per Variety), "And nobody died in the holocaust, either, that's the truth. It should happen — six million Jews should die right now, because they cause all the problems in the world. But it never happened."

In the same video with Von, Barr (who is Jewish) claimed Jewish people control show business, adding, "People should be glad that it's Jewish too, because if Jews did not control Hollywood all you'd have was f***ing fishing shows." This was yet another instance of Barr's confusing stance toward Judaism and Nazism, coming 15 years after she dressed up as Adolf Hitler for Heeb. She has called Israel a "Nazi state" and once wrote on her blog (per the aforementioned Jewish Chronicle article), "[Hitler] did not kill 'the Jewish people,' and neither did Haman and neither did Martin Luther, or the Popes of the Vatican, or any of the other despots on earth who caused many to suffer and die, but are now only dust and nothing more. Get over Hitler, Jewish people!!"

Roseanne Barr's latest attempted comeback was closely aligned with Fox News, which released her stand-up special "Cancel This!" on the Fox Nation streaming platform. Her comedy special was lambasted for pandering to MAGA loyalists for "clapter," opting for lines that elicit political claps and not actual laughs. Instead of humor, she recycled groan-worthy "jokes" from far-right Senator Ted Cruz ("My pronouns are kiss my ass!") and ranted about the coronavirus vaccination, per Jezebel. Her campaign of cringe continued, despite many asking, "Whatever happened to Roseanne Barr?" In 2025, she appeared (replete with cornrows and chains) in a pro-Trump rap music video with white Canadian rapper Tom MacDonald for the January 2025 song, "Daddy's Home," where she screeched about being canceled and refusing vaccines.

Barr has resumed one of her longest relationships and returned to X, where she consistently posts her unhinged thoughts. "The UK, Europe, and Ireland are Islamic lands!! White colonizers must go back to wherever they came from!" Barr wrote mockingly on September 2. "Jews in [the] Middle East were forcibly converted to Islam by the sword!" she wrote on September 6, 2025. No one seemed to notice, at least outside of X, where users replied with laughing emojis, antisemitic comments, and questions like, "Did you forget to take your medication again, Roseanne?" Like Sisyphus on Ambien, Barr will likely keep posting, doomed as she is to repeat her mistakes, loving the very place that destroyed her.