Comedian Margaret Cho recently shared a harsh opinion about Ellen DeGeneres during a Kelly Mantle Show podcast appearance.
Cho said she had known DeGeneres for a long time and that the public now sees her true personality, which matches Cho’s own experiences. Cho described DeGeneres as acting like a “mean girl,” though she also admitted DeGeneres could be kind at times.
As per Page Six, this is a big statement coming from someone who knew DeGeneres before she became hugely famous. Cho explained that her relationship with DeGeneres had been complicated over the years. She believes DeGeneres disliked her because DeGeneres’ past partners and spouses often admired Cho. According to Cho, a certain kind of woman is attracted to female comedians, and DeGeneres’ partners seemed to fit that description when it came to Cho. Cho claims this dynamic made DeGeneres act cold and unpleasant toward her for most of her career.
The two comedians first met in the 1980s, when Cho would perform as an opening act for DeGeneres at comedy clubs. Back then, DeGeneres was not yet the massive star she would later become. Despite their long history, when Cho appeared on DeGeneres’ daytime talk show in the early 2000s, DeGeneres acted as if they had never met before. Cho found this strange and unsettling since they had known each other for years. The way DeGeneres pretended not to recognize her felt deeply odd to Cho.
Ellen DeGeneres’ former friend exposes her
Cho said, “It’s so weird now, [the] public perception of her is more true to … she’s mean. She was like a mean girl, kind of, but also she would be real nice.” She later continued, “It’s so creepy and weird, but also, the other thing was, David Bowie had been on the show, and he was so excited that the night before that, I had come to his show wearing this giant Chinese emperor outfit.”
Cho said Bowie loved the outfit she wore to his concert the night before his appearance on DeGeneres’ show. Cho had dressed in a detailed Chinese emperor costume, which Bowie adored so much that he talked about it enthusiastically during the interview. However, Cho says DeGeneres later cut this entire part of the conversation from the broadcast.
A producer, who was a close friend of Cho’s, told her about the edit and said Bowie had praised Cho’s outfit and expressed strong admiration for her work. Cho called DeGeneres’ decision to remove the segment “creepy and weird.” While she admitted it might have been done for time, she chose to see it as a personal insult.
Margaret Cho’s story adds more details to what people have been saying about Ellen DeGeneres behind the scenes, especially as public opinion about her has shifted in recent years. She’s not the first friend to speak out against DeGeneres since the star’s talk show ended in May 2022 after running for nearly twenty years. The decision to stop the show came about two years after it faced major controversy, with many accusations of a “toxic” work environment.
