Ellen faces backlash after ex-employees allege toxic behavior
for Ramapo News
Ellen DeGeneres is the latest celebrity to lose a majority of her support due to accusations from former staff members stating that she created a toxic workplace for them.
On Friday, DeGeneres announced that she will be talking about this controversy on the season 18 premiere of her talk show, "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."
“I can’t wait to get back to work and back to our studio. And, yes, we’re gonna talk about it,” DeGeneres said in an official statement regarding the show’s premiere.
On March 20, podcaster and comedian Kevin T. Porter first tweeted about DeGeneres’ apparent negative personality.
“Right now we all need a little kindness. You know, like Ellen Degeneres always talks about! She’s also notoriously one of the meanest people alive,” Porter tweeted.
He then called for his followers to reply with “the most insane” stories they have heard or experienced with DeGeneres being mean, and the tweet now has nearly three thousand replies.
Many of these replies included former staff stating that they were told not to talk to DeGeneres or look her in the eyes when she passed by.
“Working for her, I was instructed that I can’t look her in the eye and never ever say hi to her first,” Twitter user Maggie Klaus replied.
Former waitress Chris Farah also replied with her bad experience when serving Ellen and her wife, Portia de Rossi, at a vegan restaurant.
“[Ellen] wrote a letter to the owner & complained about my chipped nail polish (not that it was on her plate but just that it was on my hand),” Farah wrote. “I had worked till closing the night before & this was next morn, almost got me fired.”
These negative experiences with DeGeneres are only a few at the top of a long list, but they have recently come back to light because the comedian’s talk show was announced to be under investigation due to its alleged toxicity in early August.
The allegations of DeGeneres’ mean behavior started back in 2016, when Kathy Griffin accused the talk show host of having her kicked out of her Emmy Awards dressing room.
While allegations of her toxic work environment have been suggested in the past, cancel culture has been popularized since the beginning of quarantine, peaking at the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement in June. It is the perfect time for Ellen DeGeneres to be exposed.
Other celebrities and social media figures that have been “cancelled” in the past few months include Lana Del Rey, Vanessa Hudgens, Shane Dawson, Jeffree Star and Lea Michele.
