Ellen DeGeneres. God, that’s a name I haven’t thought of in a while. After dominating the news cycle with allegation after allegation of bullying on her now-defunct talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the comic faded into obscurity. Her former staffers, however, seemingly haven’t stopped thinking about the chaos they endured during their time working with the star.
Just when you thought you’d heard every cooked tale from the long-running talkshow, two former staffers have come forward with brand spankin’ new stories.
Greg Fitzsimmons – who was a joke writer on The Ellen DeGeneres Show – appeared on a podcast this week, where he described his old boss as a “C-word”.
“She was rough,” he told fellow comedians Mark Normand and Sam Morril on the We Might Be Drunk podcast.
Fitzimmons (left) worked with Ellen DeGeneres on the ill-fated talkshow. (Credit: We Might Be Drunk)
He went on to recount being offered a role as a warmup comic during the show’s debut season back in 2003.
“She said, ‘Greg, you’re going to do it’,” he recalled.
“And I was like, ‘I don’t want to be the warmup guy on a daytime talk show’,” he added. “And they were like, ‘Well it’s an extra four grand a week and it’s ten minutes a day’.”
He ultimately agreed, but later regretted his decision due to her erratic behaviour, including one incident that left her “seething”.
During one set, he told the audience to wave any time he said the word “banana” during his set. Coincidentally, the word banana was used in Ellen’s script that day, so they continued to wave when his set was over and Ellen was on stage.
“Now, she hasn’t seen the warmup. So she says banana, and the crowd does the wave,” he said. “She’s a control freak, so this is like the worst thing that could ever happen.
“She stops and goes, ‘Okay, that’s weird. Whatever that was, don’t do that’,” he continued.
She then says banana for a second time and the crowd waves again, leaving her even more confused.
“Finally, I just go up on stage and I explain to her what happened,” he recalled. “And she was fucking seething.”
“I thought, ‘Alright, I’m getting fired for that’. And I didn’t, but then everything got weird and we started winning Emmys,” he said. “I won four Emmys on the show, but that made things bad.”
Fitzsimmons claimed that DeGeneres became increasingly temperamental as her career soared, suggesting she “turned mean mean because she was back on top”. After his time working for her, he accepted a lead writer position on The Man Show alongside Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla.
Carolla, now a podcaster, recently recounted on his show that during his two guest appearances on DeGeneres’ daytime program, staff members appeared “scared – really scared”.
“I had written on a lot of shows before, and I knew what it was like to have tough bosses. I wrote for Bill Maher. I was tough enough, but then there were these first-time writers who cried. It was a lot of crying always.”
Catch the pod below:
Meanwhile, a former cameraman on The Ellen DeGeneres Show has spoken to Daily Mail, alleging Ellen disliked her male staffers and was particularly pissed whenever someone would mingle with her wife, Aussie actress Portia De Rossi.
“We went through a lot of male employees just in general,” he alleged on the same day the aforementioned pod dropped. “We had a feeling she really didn’t like guys.”
The cameraman said Portia was “nice” to the crew, but if someone was ever “caught in conversation with Portia”, there’d be hell to pay.
“You just hoped and prayed you weren’t seated by her wife, so you didn’t get her attention,” he added.
The cameraman said Ellen had a signature mean stare she would give, which they named “Ellen gaze”.
He compared the gaze to a “queen looking for her next execution”, adding that Ellen was “terrifying”.
The camera king also lifted the lid on a famous feud that had been under wraps until now: Ellen DeGeneres vs Gordon Ramsay.
He recalled how the talkshow host got upset with the celeb chef after he appeared on the show for a cooking demo and dissed the grade of meat he was provided with.
“She told one of her EPs, ‘Don’t let this guy on the show again’,” he alleged. “You were uninvited as a guest pretty easily.”
Ellen DeGeneres and Gordon Ramsay getting spicy in the kitchen. (Credit: The Ellen Show)
Another heinous allegation involving a producer whose child apparently needed a bone marrow transplant.
“This was a person pretty high up. This person was asked if they could move the procedure around the Christmas holiday week, for Ellen,” the cameraman alleged.
He said the staffer abided by the request, noting, “It was all loyalty to the show, but no loyalty to staff”.
Days after these two staffers came forward with their stories, a third source shared an alleged incident that occurred on set.
Speaking to Daily Mail, the anonymous staffer recounted how Ellen “flipped out” over a revenge prank the crew played on her.
“She liked Vans shoes with white laces,” the source said. “And someone swapped it with a toddler version of the same shoes – basically to say, like, you’re being a baby. She went to put them on, and she flipped out.”
Concluding their statement, the anon team member said the one silverlining to Ellen’s prickly nature was that “tapings were usually 45 minutes to an hour”.
“When she was in a bad mood, we had extra quick tapings,” they said.
So, where is the blonde, boogying menace now? Ellen and her wife Portia recently moved to the UK, which she claims was a result of Donald Trump becoming president once again.
Speaking of her sea change, the aforementioned joke writer said: “I think she’s out of the country. I don’t really care,” he said.
Fair enough, my friend!
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