Eight years after Roseanne Barr’s sudden exit from the sitcom that carried her name, the fallout is still dividing people who were once part of the same television family.

This time, the conflict has become strikingly personal.

Barr’s real-life son, Jake Pentland, has sharply criticized Michael Fishman — the actor who spent years playing her onscreen son D.J. Conner — after Fishman revisited the controversy surrounding Barr’s 2018 firing.

Fishman, 44, played D.J. on Roseanne from 1988 until 1997 and later returned to the role when the sitcom was revived. He subsequently appeared during the first four seasons of The Conners, the spinoff that continued without Barr.

The disagreement centers on the decision that changed the future of the franchise.

Barr, now 73, was fired from the Roseanne revival in 2018 following a social-media post that contained racially charged language. Years later, Fishman has made clear that he believes the decision to remove her was justified.

But his position was not simply a rejection of the woman he had known for decades.

Fishman said he still felt affection and compassion for Barr while disagreeing strongly with what she had done. He described her online language as harmful and argued that words can create consequences beyond the person posting them.

That distinction did little to satisfy Pentland.

Pentland, 48, the youngest of Barr’s three sons with her first husband, Bill Pentland, defended his mother and presented a dramatically different interpretation of what happened after the controversial post.

He argued that members of the Roseanne cast had effectively turned against Barr, maintaining that her social-media comments were taken out of context and that she was never given a meaningful opportunity to explain herself before others publicly distanced themselves from her.

His strongest words were reserved for Fishman.

Pentland suggested that the actor had betrayed someone who played an enormous role in establishing his career, sarcastically wishing him luck finding future work and questioning whether speaking against Barr had been worth it.

The criticism adds another layer to a relationship that once existed inside one of television’s most recognizable fictional families.

For years, audiences knew Fishman as D.J., the youngest Conner child growing up under Roseanne and Dan Conner. His history with the sitcom stretched from childhood into adulthood, making his later disagreement with Barr more complicated than a simple clash between two entertainment figures.

Fishman himself has acknowledged that complexity.

While discussing Barr, he emphasized that opposing her actions did not mean erasing the affection he continued to feel for her. He said he could believe someone was capable of making a serious mistake while still caring about that person.

At the same time, he rejected the suggestion that the controversy was merely a misunderstanding or that those criticizing Barr had betrayed her. In his view, the people most harmed were those targeted by the language itself, along with others who suffered consequences afterward.

Pentland sees the history very differently.

His response suggests that, for Barr’s family, the events of 2018 remain about more than the loss of a television job. They are also tied to questions of loyalty and whether people who had spent years working beside Barr abandoned her when the controversy erupted.

That difference in perspective has reopened a dispute that never entirely disappeared.

One side sees accountability for language that caused genuine harm. The other sees a woman whose longtime colleagues failed to stand beside her or allow her to fully explain herself.

And caught between those two versions of the past is an unusual relationship: a real son defending his mother against the man millions of viewers once knew as her son on television.

The Conner family may have survived on television without Roseanne Barr, but nearly a decade after the controversy that transformed the franchise, the relationships behind the show remain far more complicated.