Roseanne Barr (Photo: Getty)

In late January, the comedienne and former sitcom star Roseanne Barr declared her intention to run for president on the Green Party line. Ms. Barr's Green Party bid ultimately proved unsuccessful after Massachusetts doctor Jill Stein secured the party's nomination at its convention in July. Now, Ms. Barr is continuing her quest for the White House as a candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party with anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan as her running mate. However, Ms. Barr may not have tied up all the loose ends associated with her first campaign.

Anita Stewart, who said she served as Press Secretary Ms. Barr's Green Party bid, told Politicker she is owed $4,300 for her work on the campaign. Ms. Stewart claimed she has spent nearly the past three months fighting to get the money Ms. Barr agreed to pay her and said the delay in payment has caused her immense hardships. She said the situation is especially egregious given the fact Ms. Barr has made millions through her comedy and TV career and ranked as the second-highest-paid woman in showbiz (behind only Oprah Winfrey) during the final two years of her eponymous sitcom in the late nineties.

"Right now, I'm living below poverty level wages," Ms. Stewart said adding that she has been unable to take care of medical expenses and has had trouble maintaining her car, which she needs to travel to and from work in the small town where she lives about fifty miles outside of Tampa, Florida.

Ms. Stewart described herself as a longtime activist who worked on Congressman Dennis Kucinich's 2008 presidential campaign and serves as an elected official on the Hillsborough County Soil and Water Conservation Board. She said she started working on Ms. Barr's presidential campaign in the last week of March and was introduced to Ms. Barr by former congresswoman and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, who was also working on the campaign and knew Ms. Stewart from their work with the Greens.

On April 5, Ms. Stewart said she sent Joan Christian, the campaign's treasurer, a job description that outlined her duties and stipulated her pay at $2,000 per month to be paid bi-weekly, if possible. Ms. Stewart gave a copy of this email to us. It said she would be responsible for "campaign website consulting," social media, "press and media requests," fundraising and "media research," among other tasks, and that she would work for approximately eight to twelve hours each day on behalf of the campaign. According to Ms. Stewart, the campaign "verbally agreed" to this arrangement.

"They verbally agreed that they were going to pay me," said Ms. Stewart. "That was the understanding, and because of the verbal agreement, and what I had emailed them and the fact that they had that in their possession, I had no questions about--I had no doubt that I was going to get paid, so I started to do the work."

According to financial disclosure reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, Ms. Stewart was paid $1,000 on April 1 for "social media" and another $700 June 1 for "press release. At the end of June, Ms. Stewart said she stopped working because she had not been paid the remaining $4,300 for the three months of work.

Ms. Stewart provided us with an invoice she sent to the campaign on July 5. She said she re-sent the invoice one week later after not receiving a response to her first message. Ms. Stewart forwarded us another email she said she received from Ms. Barr after sending the invoice a second time. In that email, Ms. Barr offered to pay Ms. Stewart $1,500 and claimed it was her understanding Ms. Stewart had agreed to raise the funds for her own salary.

"cynthia said u got 1700 for the first month and u were told that u would need to raise the rest yourself, which did not happen-I am willing to pay you 1500 more-since its not my fault that no money was raised-thanks," Ms. Barr wrote.

Ms. Stewart told us she never agreed to raise the money needed for her pay. She also claimed Ms. Barr promised to put $50,000 of her own money into the campaign and only contributed half of that amount. According to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission, Ms. Barr gave her campaign a $25,000 loan and raised just under $9,000. Ms. Stewart provided us with an email outlining her grievances entitled "Final Thoughts on the Campaign" that she said she sent to Ms. McKinney, Ms. Christian and other campaign staffers on July 17, three days after Ms. Barr lost the Green Party nomination.

"I was not a volunteer receiving a stipend and that was never the agreement. Roseanne was supposed to have $50,000 in her campaign account but only put in half of that. Now I am being blamed by Roseanne for funds not being raised during the campaign. How is that?" Ms. Stewart wrote. "I was Campaign Media and Press/Press Secretary, not a full time fundraiser. I agreed to assist with fundraising on the social networks but I never agreed to be the sole person doing that job."

Nine days later, Ms. Stewart said she wrote another message to Ms. Barr and other campaign staffers in which she noted she had not received any response to her messages about payment and alluded to the possibility she might "seek legal counsel." Ms. Stewart gave us a pair of responses she said she received from Ms. Barr in which the comedienne-slash-candidate accused her of extortion.

"I was going to pay u but your threats have ended it. My lawyers will contact yours. Let us know who is representing you. As you agreed and failed to raise your own money, good luck!" Ms. Barr wrote. "I am also going to pursue a defamation suit against you and alert the police that you are attempting to extort money from me, despite an agreement to raise your own funding which you failed to do."

Ms. Stewart provided us with an email that she said she received from Ms. Barr's attorney, Sandy Fox, the following day. In that message, Mr. Fox included a Settlement Agreement and Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Agreement.

"Please review the agreement and, if acceptable to you, please arrange to sign it. We will then arrange for our client to pay you the monies you claim are due, i.e., $4,300," he wrote.

Ms. Stewart said she asked for the agreement to be modified as it protected Ms. Barr from being sued by her, but didn't give her similar protection from Ms. Barr. She said Mr. Fox sent her a revised agreement a little over a month later, but she decided not to sign it because she objected to the $4,300 payment being termed a "settlement."

"They're calling it a settlement, these are my wages. I worked for these wages," said Ms. Stewart.

Ms. Stewart said she hasn't heard from Mr. Fox since he sent the second non-disclosure agreement and still hasn't received the money she is owed. She described the situation as especially troublesome since, throughout her career and especially during her White House run, Ms. Barr has characterized herself as a defender of the working poor. Based on her experience, Ms. Stewart believes Ms. Barr may be more interested in making a movie she is working on about her campaign experiences than in genuinely championing the causes she claims to be advocating for.

"I think Roseanne has forgotten where she comes from and I think we need to look at what this woman is worth and how she's playing the system," Ms. Stewart said. "She's taking campaign funds and contributions, but is she really running a real campaign, or is her bottom line and her agenda really all about this movie she's making? If that's the case, then she's really duped the people that are standing up for her, and voting for her and supporting her."

Ms. Stewart said she waited this long to come forward because she "wanted to protect" Ms. Barr. She said she decided to share her story now because her situation has still not been resolved and she is concerned a similar thing may happen to people who work with Ms. Barr's new Peace and Freedom Party campaign.

We reached out to Ms. Barr and her publicist, James Moore, for a response on this story. Mr. Moore responded with an email suggesting we get in touch with Ms. McKinney, Ms. Christian and Mr. Fox. We sent them all emails as well, however, as of this writing, we have yet to receive any responses.

Illustration, by Drew Friedman

“I’m loving it,” said Roseanne Barr, recently announced presidential candidate. “I find that I can be more honest in politics than in Hollywood.”

Not that she’s ever been accused of demurring in either realm.

Seeking to run on the Green Party line, Ms. Barr’s presidential bid, she said, is primarily motivated by her dissatisfaction with both major political parties—in particular their candidates, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, whom she referred to as “total buffoons.”

“That’s what I say: I’m the only serious comedian in this race,” Ms. Barr added.

In a career spanning more than 40 years, including rollicking standup performances, a watershed sitcom and a memorable performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Ms. Barr has been at turns provocative, endearing, innovative and combative. As of February, she has turned her considerable personality toward the interests of the American electorate. In a pair of lengthy interviews with The Observer, she outlined not only her political aspirations, but the possibility of returning to television—and not necessarily in the way you would expect.

“I feel sorry for the American people who’ve been hoodwinked by both of these parties of nothing but criminals that sit in Congress there enriching themselves,” she began.

As it happens, legalization of marijuana is the first issue in the political platform posted on Ms. Barr’s website. She said she has a prescription to use the drug for glaucoma in California and vowed to smoke a joint at a public press conference if she is victorious in the Golden State’s Green Party primary this week.

“I don’t really smoke it, but I have a salve of it, you know, and if you rub it into your wrists, you don’t get high,” Ms. Barr said. “You’re not getting high but you feel release. I have salve and I have cookies.”

Other issues on Ms. Barr’s platform include ending the Federal Reserve, stopping “debt slavery” by “forgiving all school loans,” withdrawing military support for Israel and making war “obsolete.”

“Wars make the stock market go up and are fueled by profits. Where one puts their money is where one puts their energy,” Ms. Barr explains on her site. “The Military Industrial Complex is our shadow government.”

She also is concerned about preserving the environment, particularly water resources.

“Those that lead us have allowed the corporations to cross over the web of life and they have destroyed the genetic code,” she wrote. “They have befouled our food and water supply.”

She describes her economic policy—if that’s the right word—as a synthesis of free enterprise and the social safety net.

“We can have a really great world. We can have a world that was at peace and was prosperous and efficient and just ... I just think, wow. I think we’re really in that cosmic space where we can actually command our group will to make something change very quickly. I think we’re just so on the verge of that,” Ms. Barr said. “I just like to encourage people to jump off, man. Jump off and start thinking clearly.”

Cookies, indeed.

Another point Ms. Barr emphasized is that being a woman makes her a more insightful leader.

“This is a post-patriarchal age, and that’s what I represent; it’s a return to actual values of the Earth like growing food that we can eat. Not tomatoes made of fish skin,” Ms. Barr said. “We know how to get things done and we know how to get them done cheaply and efficiently.”

The problem with that notion, however, is that Ms. Barr’s main opponent, and the favorite for the Green Party nomination, is also a woman, Dr. Jill Stein, an academic and environmental activist who has been representing the Green Party in political campaigns at the local level since 2002, when she ran (against Romney) for governor of Massachusetts. Though Ms. Barr says she agrees on many things with Dr. Stein, she believes she is the better candidate—and took a shot at her opponent from the left, or at least from left field.

“I think I have far more to say than she does,” Ms. Barr said of Dr. Stein. “Some of the things that I say, they’re not out of a book and they’re not out of the party bible.”

For her part, Dr. Stein, declined to comment.

“They’re resisting me and the message that I’m bringing in a big way,” Mr. Barr doubled down. “To ask working people to show up and then go get their ballot notarized is nothing but voter suppression. That’s making me very angry, and I really beseech the Greens to be who they say they are and get their act together.”

Based on the most recent numbers provided by the Green Party, Dr. Stein is currently leading the race for the nomination with 143 party delegates compared to Ms. Barr’s 40. There are two other candidates, Kent Mesplay, who has 7.5 delegates, and Harvey Mikkelson, who has won just 1.5 delegates.

“I don’t know what the outcome will be. I know it’s a possibility that I could receive 99 percent of the vote. I also know that it’s a probability that I will not,” Ms. Barr admitted. “I’m just trying to encourage people to look at the whole picture, the whole big picture, and I want to bring up subject matter that isn’t covered in other presidential platforms.”

Should she not make it to the White House, she is more than willing to return to her day job—or at least to her job playing someone with a day job. During the final two years of her career as a the star of her eponymous show, Roseanne, Ms. Barr ranked as the second-highest-paid woman in showbiz (behind only Oprah Winfrey). The sitcom ran on ABC from 1988 until 1997 and, for its first seven seasons, held a spot in the top 10 on the Nielsen ratings charts. That’s a bankability the networks don’t soon forget

And though she’s done a couple of short-lived reality shows, including one entitled Roseanne’s Nuts, she may soon be reprising the form that made her career. Her latest effort is another sitcom, a pilot called Downwardly Mobile, in which she portrays the owner of a trailer park whose denizens include a “young Hispanic boy” adopted by the residents after his mother was deported and “a Wall Street couple that lost all their money.”

“It was about cooperation rather than competition, the key values that I hold dear and America needs,” Ms. Barr said emphatically. “I just wanted the American people to once again see themselves as heroic on television.”

Downwardly Mobile, which Ms. Barr wrote and executive produced, would reunite her with John Goodman, her husband on Roseanne. She says she “patterned each character” after the family she and Mr. Goodman headed on her successful sitcom. NBC picked up the pilot for Downwardly Mobile last fall, but according to Ms. Barr, the show was initially shelved because of her outspoken political views.

To hear her tell it, Downwardly Mobile tested well in California, but days before it was scheduled to be shown to audiences in New York, the conservative entertainment website Big Hollywood published an article based on leaked reports the show was testing poorly due to Ms. Barr being a “leftist.” Ms. Barr complained to NBC about the reported leak.

“I got really mad and I said, ‘Why would you release that information?’ And I was told, ‘We didn’t, that’s just a fake website,” she said. “Well, it turned out to be completely true.”

Once the show tested with audiences in New York, Ms. Barr says she was told it wouldn’t be picked up because network executives deemed it too “polarizing.”

“How they figure what is polarizing is blows my mind. It really has blown my mind,” she said. “I guess it went back to the sponsors on the East Coast and some of them are—they don’t like me no matter what I do and they don’t like the things I say, so it’s kind of like blacklisting or something. But the fact is that I still think it’s weird to blacklist, or whatever you want to call it, in Hollywood, someone who has a huge—whose show had a huge audience and still does after 20-something years.”

Downwardly Mobile may have foundered at first, but the pilot is apparently still alive, despite Ms. Barr’s fears of being blacklisted. During our first conversation with Ms. Barr, she said the show had been killed. When we spoke a few hours later, she told us NBC was giving it another chance as a potential midseason replacement.

“The Downwardly Mobile thing, I just kind of heard that it’s not completely dead,” said Ms. Barr. “Since I talked to you I got a phone call and I might be getting a chance to retool it, which I hope and pray I would get.”

But in her own estimation, even her television career has been a political effort, in many ways.

“I really hate to toot my own horn, but since I’m a woman I feel I have to,” she told The Observer. “I not only pushed the boundaries, I introduced the subject of gay characters on television,” said Ms. Barr, whose brother and sister are both gay. “That was at great peril to my own career and against all of my advisors. I brought the whole issue of gay to television.”

And just as her television career was politicized, she plans to bring her political career to the screen.

“I am making a movie of my campaign. I’m making a documentary of it for many reasons, and it is funny,” she said. “I am using the crew and the team of my friend Michael Moore, and I am documenting running for president and how hard it is.”

There’s another area of the political realm Ms. Barr says she could potentially get involved with—cable news punditry. Despite her obviously liberal leanings, Ms. Barr says she’d be interested in doing a show with Fox News.

“They’ve always been so fair and nice to me at Fox,” she elaborated. “I just don’t like Fox when it doesn’t get the complete fair and balance, but I do think they do try to, even though some of the people like Sean Hannity and stuff, the things they attack are just ridiculous. But yet, they have the right to do that. You can’t discount that people have the right to freedom of speech. I told Fox I’d sure like to have a show on there, because the people who watch Fox News are people like me also. So, it would be good to be really fair and balanced and have a nice left point of view on there.”

Ms. Barr told us she has been in talks with the network and, at one point, Fox News was ready to give her a show.

“They do talk to me about it … We’ve had beers and laughed about it and stuff. Offers have been made and I just didn’t get on with it because I was trying to just do that sitcom,” Ms. Barr said. “It could happen. Stranger things have happened. It could happen definitely.”

hwalker@observer.com