Before Ellen DeGeneres abruptly canceled 4 upcoming dates of her stand-up tour, including one in San Francisco, she told a Santa Rosa audience on July 1, “This is the last time you'll see me.” She said she was “saying goodbye” and retiring after being “kicked out of show business for her mean behavior.”
“After my Netflix special, I'm done,” DeGeneres said during a Q&A portion of the show. SFGate reportedShe was referring to a Netflix presentation of her “Ellen's Last Stand… Up Tour,” which is about to look on the streamer later this yr. However, DeGeneres remains to be scheduled to perform in San Francisco on July 20 and proceed her tour in other cities through August.
Still, DeGeneres' laments about being “kicked out of show business” are a reminder of her stunning fall from grace within the spring and summer of 2020, and the way that resurgence began with a single tweet. That tweet was followed by a scathing investigative report in Buzzfeed News and an internal investigation into her eponymous daytime talk show, all of which undermined her global, multimillion-dollar brand built on her “be nice” persona.
The exposé in Buzzfeed described how DeGeneres' show became a toxic workplace where she played favorites and employees faced “racism, fear and intimidation” and were instructed not to talk to the star in the event that they saw her within the office. DeGeneres apologized over the summer. But the next spring, she announced that she would end her show the next yr, after season 19.
But even before the Buzzfeed report and the interior investigation, DeGeneres' status damage looked as if it would have been set in motion by the tweet: in accordance with Daily Mail. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when everyone was gripped by fear and going into lockdown, comedian and podcaster Kevin T. Porter turned to X (then called Twitter) to ask people to share their “craziest stories they’ve heard about Ellen’s meanness.”
“We all need a little kindness right now,” Porter said on X“You know how Ellen Degeneres always talks about it!”
“She is also notoriously one of the meanest people in the world,” Porter continued. “Respond to this with the craziest stories you've heard about Ellen's meanness and I will match each one with $2 to @LAFoodBank.”
Perhaps because people didn't have much else to do, Porter's post was inundated with greater than 2,000 replies from people, lots of whom claimed to have had unpleasant encounters with DeGeneres or who had heard plausible-sounding secondhand accounts of others being treated dismissively or worse.
“When I worked for her, I was told not to look her in the eye and never to say hello to her first,” One person tweeted: She said she was also told that the star “definitely won't say hi to her first.”
“I can't vouch for anything being 'real' if it didn't happen to me, but that's as close as I get,” one other person wrote. “My friend who works at Real Food Daily says Ellen came to dinner and when she saw her waitress had a broken fingernail, she called management and tried to get her fired.” Others said they knew of fans who had unpleasant experiences within the audience of the show or whose creations were featured on the show without being credited.
Within two days of posting his tweet, Porter expressed surprise in any respect the responses and acknowledged that it was hard to inform whether some stories were “true or not.” But he said he had collected about 300 plausible-sounding stories about DeGeneres' nastiness and donated $600 to the Los Angeles Food Bank.
Porter's tweet looked as if it would encourage people to level much more criticism at DeGeneres, especially after she filmed her show on April 6, 2020, from her home where she was in quarantine, the Daily Mail reported. DeGeneres spoke to the camera from her multimillion-dollar mansion and jokingly compared her situation to that of inmates in prison. On social media, people accused her of being insensitive and out of touch with reality, stating that many Americans are dying and most of the people watching her show are doing so in much smaller and fewer luxurious spaces.
As the backlash against DeGeneres grew on social media, people shared clips of segments of her show that, in hindsight, suggested problematic behavior, the Daily Mail reported. Most notable was DeGeneres' embarrassing interview with actor Dakota Johnson in 2019. When DeGeneres insisted to Johnson that she had not been invited to her recent celebration, Johnson demurred, saying, “Actually, that's not true, Ellen. You were invited.”
Johnson told DeGeneres she made sure to ask her since the talk show host had complained that she hadn't been invited to her celebration during her last appearance on her show. “I didn't even know you liked me,” Johnson said, “but I invited you and you didn't come.” When DeGeneres objected, Johnson told her, “Ask everybody. Ask Jonathan, your producer.”
Five years later, as DeGeneres says she's quitting her profession, she used her time onstage on the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa to deal with the 2020 reports and draw some dark humor from her experience together with her own version of cancel culture. She said she's been fired from show business once before – in 1998, when her sitcom “Ellen” was canceled after she got here out as a lesbian.
“Next time I'm going to get kicked out because I'm old. Old, gay and mean, the triple crown,” DeGeneres joked, in accordance with SFGate. She acknowledged that she may be “demanding and impatient and tough” and “a strong woman.”
But DeGeneres ultimately refuted the allegations that ruined her profession. She told the gang, “I'm a lot of things, but I'm not mean.”
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