Jimmy Kimmel was blasted by his fans for suggesting she needs compassion and help.
There are growing concerns about Roseanne Barr's mental state days after a racist Twitter rant led ABC to ax her hit TV show.
Late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel said Wednesday that Barr needs help amid the fallout over the tweet and the cancellation of "Roseanne," and issued a rebuke for those attacking her on social media.
"Angrily attacking a woman who is obviously not well does no good to anyone...mental health issues are real. The real Roseanne I know could probably use some compassion and help right now," Kimmel tweeted.
His tweet triggered a barrage of criticism of Kimmel on social media from those who called his reaction "disappointing" and another who informed him that "mental illness does not give a person a free pass."
Barr has acknowledged she is bipolar. She told ABC News last January she has a history of mental problems.
“I did have a few nervous breakdowns and I was hospitalized several times," she said during the interview. "It was very difficult."
Barr’s ex-husband, Tom Arnold, says reviving "Roseanne" may have been asking for trouble.
"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" this week.
“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," he added.
Barr has posted more than a hundred tweets since "Roseanne" was canceled, and many of them are defiant.
“I'm tired of being smeared over a stupid mistake erasing 30 years of activism,” she said in one.
She is embracing a discredited conspiracy theory that blamed the cancellation of her show on a shadowy coalition of Twitter users known as the FBR, which is short for "Follow Back Resistance."
"They muster up their folk to make thousands of calls to take ppl off the airwaves," Barr claimed.
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