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Roseanne Had Some Words For Her 9-Year-Old Co-Star

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A single deleted tweet showed the softer side of a controversy that ended a hit reboot in one afternoon.

Three days after ABC pulled the plug on “Roseanne,” the show’s star turned her attention away from network executives and toward the smallest member of her cast. Jayden Rey, the 9-year-old actress who played Roseanne Conner’s granddaughter Mary, became the unlikely focus of Roseanne Barr’s public reckoning on Thursday, May 31, 2018. Amid a defensive, often combative string of tweets, Barr’s words about Rey stood apart for their tone of genuine regret.

• ABC canceled “Roseanne” on May 29, 2018, after Barr posted a racist tweet comparing former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape.
• In a since-deleted tweet on May 31, Barr wrote that the hardest part of the fallout was fearing she’d “hurt sweet Jayden Rey,” the child actress who played her on-screen granddaughter, Mary Conner.
• Barr blamed her outburst on the sleep aid Ambien while also lashing out at co-star Michael Fishman, tweeting, “I created the platform for that inclusivity and you know it. You throw me under the bus.”

The Tweet That Ended a Reboot

The “Roseanne” revival had been one of the biggest comeback stories on television, but it unraveled in a single day. ABC canceled the show on May 29, 2018, hours after Barr compared Jarrett, who is Black, to an ape in a tweet that spread instantly across social media. The network’s decision was swift and total, wiping out a series that had just posted some of the strongest ratings of any sitcom on the air.

Rey played Mary Conner, the daughter of D.J. Conner (Michael Fishman) and Geena Williams-Conner, making her Roseanne’s on-screen granddaughter in a storyline Barr had previously spoken about with pride. Before the scandal, Barr had publicly praised the decision to write Rey’s character into the family, framing it as proof the reboot reflected a modern, multi-ethnic American household.

Barr’s Message to Her Youngest Co-Star

That earlier pride made Barr’s Thursday tweets land differently. In the post she later deleted, Barr wrote that nothing about the collapse of her show weighed on her as heavily as the possibility that her words had hurt a child she’d worked alongside for months.

“The thing that hurts my heart more than anything is that I may have hurt sweet Jayden Rey.”

Barr added that she felt “ashamed” that her own behavior could reflect on or wound a 9-year-old who had no part in the controversy. It was a notably different register from the rest of her feed that day, where she was busy defending herself to adults rather than apologizing to one of her castmates.

A Defensive Tone Toward the Adults on Set

While Barr softened when Rey’s name came up, she didn’t extend the same grace to her grown co-stars. After Fishman released a statement mourning the show’s cancellation and condemning racism, Barr fired back publicly, insisting she deserved credit rather than blame: “I created the platform for that inclusivity and you know it. You throw me under the bus.” She also pointed to Ambien as a factor in her original tweet, an explanation the drug’s manufacturer, Sanofi, publicly rejected within a day of the cancellation.

The contrast between Barr’s combative tweets about her adult colleagues and her contrite words for Rey didn’t go unnoticed by fans parsing the fallout in real time, in the same way social media has repeatedly turned a single post into a career-altering moment for other public figures.

Rey herself never responded publicly to Barr’s tweet, and no further statement from the young actress or her family followed in the days after the cancellation. What’s left is Barr’s own account: a show that built part of its comeback narrative on an inclusive, multigenerational family, undone by the same star who’d once bragged about writing that family into being.