Who was Roseanne Barr’s ex-husband and what did he have to say about her infamous racist tweet?

There are a few answers to the question “Who was Roseanne Barr married to?” and probably dozens of answers to the question “What did they say about her career-flattening tweets?”

Chances are, though, that you’re wondering about Barr’s second husband, comedian and True Lies 2 enthusiast Tom Arnold. See, Barr has been married three times: In 1974, she tied the knot with motel clerk Bill Pentland, and the union lasted for just shy of 16 years. In 1995, she married her former bodyguard, Ben Thomas. They made it until 2002 before splitting up. In 2003, she began a relationship with Johnny Argent, a writer, and the two have been together ever since, cohabitating on a macadamia nut farm in Hawaii. 

And right in the middle, between two weeks after her marriage to Pentland ended and 10 months before her marriage to Thomas, Roseanne Barr married Tom Arnold. The four-year coupling saw great acts of creation: Arnold became a regular on Roseanne, landed his own sitcom, and the two co-owned a sandwich shop. There were also losses. The sandwich shop went out of business.

And in the years that followed, Arnold became a go-to expert when it came to Barr’s frequently erratic behavior. By way of example: When Barr was excised from ABC’s Roseanne revival in 2018 following one of her many social media catastrophes, the media went to Arnold for insights. 

For anyone fuzzy on the details, on May 29, 2018, Barr described Valerie Jarrett, an African-American advisor to the Obama administration, by saying that she looked like the “muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes had a baby.” The backlash was more or less instantaneous: ABC’s parent company, Disney, fired Barr and canceled Roseanne, eventually reconfiguring it as The Conners. 

Arguments were made – largely by Barr – that Barr wasn’t being racist, just rude and, generously, really dumb. But her ex-husband had other thoughts. 

Arnold spoke with Good Morning Britain not long after the offending incident, and was asked point-blank “is she a racist?” His answer: “Uh, yeah. Yeah. Obviously.” He went on to express his frustrations with Barr’s previous six months of tweets, which included her vocal support for the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracies.

Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on May 30, 2018, Arnold stated that he “was not surprised at what went down,” explaining that he’d felt confident that something like this might happen when he heard that Roseanne was coming back. “I tweeted a lot to watch out,” he recalled, pointing out that the May 2018 incident was not the only time that Barr had compared Black people to monkeys.

Arnold was also forthright about the role that Roseanne’s high-profile mental health struggles played in her behavior. “Anyone with mental health issues like Roseanne is gonna heighten things, and she’s having mental health issues right now, and I’m sure that’s part of this. It doesn’t make it okay. They had to cancel the show.”