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Six former The Ellen DeGeneres Show employees have anonymously spoken out against the star’s new Netflix standup special For Your Approval, telling Rolling Stone that DeGeneres’ framing of herself as someone who was kicked out of show business “continues to invalidate and deny our experience.”
If you’ve forgotten what went down with DeGeneres a few years ago outside of her famously intense 2019 interview with Dakota Johnson, a quick refresher: In 2020, nearly a dozen current and former The Ellen DeGeneres Show employees publicly accused her of fostering an abusive, racist, and overall toxic workplace environment. Two years later, the show ended. Earlier in 2020, DeGeneres became a subject of public discourse after comedian Kevin Porter shared a viral X post asking for users to respond with “the most insane stories you’ve ever heard about Ellen being mean.”
As Them noted last week, DeGeneres chooses to focus on the latter at the top of For Your Approval, during which a montage of headlines calling her “mean” swirl around her head. She then tells the audience that she got “kicked out of show business,” despite having reportedly been paid $20 million for her last Netflix set. Speaking to Rolling Stone, her former employees pushed back on DeGeneres equating her reported meanness with more serious workplace allegations.
“There’s a difference between your persona and the way that you were handled in the media versus the culture that you perpetuated which hurt a lot of people,” one source told the outlet. “She was misrepresenting the narrative and trying to reframe herself as not a bully… She really missed the mark.”
During the special, DeGeneres says she was “kicked out of show business” twice — once for being gay, and once for being mean. The star famously came out on her eponymous sitcom Ellen in 1997 and faced backlash and career sidelining for years afterward, before making a comeback with her talk show in 2003. One former employee who once idolized DeGeneres “as a young person figuring out my sexuality” expressed regret that, after dealing with such public homophobia decades ago, their former boss couldn’t look at the circumstances of her 2020 reckoning with more nuance.
“I have empathy for what she went through back then, and I wish that she could have that empathy now,” they told Rolling Stone. “Especially after all the things she went through, you would think she would try to remember or relate on a human level instead of turning everything into material.”
Another employee concurred, adding, “Even if [her ‘cancellation’] was because she was mean, that is something that she has done to other people, whereas being gay is about her being judged, and it’s interesting that she can’t see it outside of the lens of herself.”
“It only exists as either ‘it’s happening to me because I am a strong woman’ or ‘it’s happening to me because I am gay,’” they continued. “It’s impossible that ‘these are the consequences for my actions.’ That doesn’t even come into her brain that these are consequences.”
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