Tom Arnold has spoken out against Roseanne Barr saying she's "obviously" racist. Photo / Getty Images
Tom Arnold has spoken out against Roseanne Barr saying she's "obviously" racist. Photo / Getty Images
Tom Arnold has branded his ex-wife Roseanne Barr a racist conspiracy theorist.
Arnold said the past six months of Barr's tweets show she is a deeply prejudiced person who believes in outlandish theories.
He compared her behaviour to Trump's, whom he also branded "racist", but admitted he had no idea that Barr was such a big fan of the President, the Daily Mail reports.
Arnold spoke in an interview with Good Morning Britain a week after his ex-wife was sacked by ABC and the reboot of her Roseanne show was canned after a tweet in which she compared a former Obama adviser to an ape.
Arnold admitted that he has not spoken to Barr in years, but he said her social media clearly shows what kind of person she has become. He said: "She's one of those conspiracy people; there's a lot of them in America.
"Our President, you know, he's a racist, he feeds into this conspiracy stuff, there's so much anxiety in our country. I see her social media and I'm like 'Oh my God she thinks Donald Trump is about to arrest Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and send them to Guantanamo'."
Arnold also appealed to Barr to "get off Twitter", which she had vowed to do shortly before being sacked, before restarting her feed just a few hours later.
i don't care if ppl can't forgive, that's their problem and they have to live like that-I still apologize bc I'm not a coward.
This is not the first time Arnold has spoke out about the controversy surrounding Barr. Just a day after she was sacked he spoke to Anderson Cooper's AC360 show.
"I was not surprised by what went down and that the show was cancelled," Arnold said during that interview. "I had a feeling this would happen when there was news of a reboot."
"This monkey thing is something that she tweeted before about black people, it's a meme that she and thousands of her alt-right fans do. They love to call black people monkeys, it's not a one-time joke," Arnold explained.
"They can do this because we have a white trash racist president. That's a fact!"
Arnold shared his disgust with how Trump was only concerned with how the media had treated him when news of Barr's tweets made their way to him. But the comedian was sure to distance Barr from Trump, insinuating that the president didn't truly care for the actress.
Arnold shared details about his several decade long relationship with Barr and Trump and told Cooper how Trump reacted when meeting Arnold at a 2005 Oscar dinner party.
Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold. Photo / Getty Images
"Oh my god, you've married up in the world," Arnold claimed Trump said to him about his wife at the time, Shelby Roos. "Then he says to me, 'Roseanne was disgusting'."
Earlier, Arnold commented to the Hollywood Reporter, claiming that Barr wanted to have the show cancelled, which he reiterated on CNN
"It had to happen," Arnold said to THR. "And I am going to tell you the truth, she wanted it to happen, if you saw how her tweets escalated this weekend. If it hadn't happened yesterday, this season would have been so awful for everyone every day because she would have felt like she was [being] taken advantage [of], just like when I left the show."
The actor shared that if Barr's phone would have been taken away, the chances of something to this degree happening would have been reduced.
"ABC lost maybe $1 billion from this; this show was grinding out money hand over fist and they lost it all because somebody didn't say, 'Get that phone out of her hand','' Arnold said. "She's not going to go on TV and say these things. But you put that phone in her hand and she is a loose cannon."
Arnold felt that Barr needed a "shield" or "someone to wrangle her in and take her phone".
He even wrote a statement for the actress to post on her Twitter.
He said: "I wrote a whole thing for her a month ago and sent it [to the crew] that said, 'I am going to take a step back, it was fun at first, but now I can see how much negativity there is out there and people are getting hurt and I am going to take a step back and I am hoping my fans will too', and then if her crazy tweets came out, she could point to that and say, 'But I have taken a step back'.''
The 65-year-old actress was widely condemned after she tweeted that Valerie Jarrett, who is African-American and advised Barack and Michelle Obama, looked like the "Muslim brotherhood & Planet of the Apes had a baby".
Trump also weighed in on Wednesday, writing: "Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that 'ABC does not tolerate comments like those' made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn't get the call?"
