LOS ANGELES — Tom Arnold, actor and ex-husband of Roseanne Barr, said Wednesday he was not surprised by the cancellation of ABC’s hit sitcom “Roseanne” after the show’s star went on a racist Twitter rant.
“I had a feeling this was going to happen when I first heard it was coming back,” Arnold told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “AC360.”
Arnold, a former writer on the original “Roseanne” suggested that Barr’s support of President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories played a part in her downfall.
“When I read her social media in the very beginning, and I saw how she was so into the conspiracy stuff with Donald Trump and so how far gone she was, and the ‘pizzagate’ and Hillary is a pedophile and Obama wasn’t born here, she was, you know, a ‘birther,’ and how crazy that was — I just knew that this would not end well,” Arnold said.
In one of the tweets that sparked outrage, she wrote, “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
Barr was responding to a comment about Valerie Jarrett, a top former aide to President Obama.
She claimed she was joking, but then she deleted the tweet and issued an apology to Jarrett and “all Americans.”
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“I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks,” Barr tweeted. “I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste.”
Arnold, who had turbulent four years of marriage with the sitcom star prior to their divorce in 1994 told Cooper that she had a long history of racist tweets.
“It’s a meme that she and thousands of her alt-right fans do,” Arnold said. “They love calling black people monkeys. It’s not a one time joke, OK. They do it because we have a white trash racist president. That’s a fact. Donald Trump — Roseanne and I have both known him 30 years. That’s an absolute fact.”
Arnold went on to criticize Trump for his past controversial comments.
“I generally believe he thinks black people are dangerous and Mexicans are rapists,” Arnold said. “He believes that. As he perpetuates that fear to America, watch out Mueller is lying, he is after me. And so, Americans are sitting home like Roseanne and her fans, are like, oh my God, what is happening out there? And they get anxiety. ”
Arnold also questioned whether Trump was really ever a fan of his former wife or just wanted to take credit for her ratings’ success. He told Cooper of a time that Trump criticized her directly after their divorce.
“He’s with Melania and I’m with my wife at the time, Shelby Roos, who’s a political consultant,” Arnold said. “And he said to me, oh my gosh, you married up in the world. And he goes, Roseanne was disgusting. And he said that to me out of the blue. Like, you know what, no matter what kind of divorce you had, that’s a weird thing to say.”
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