The Ellen DeGeneres Show has announced that it will return to air later this month on September 21. Remember when people were wondering if her popular talk show would be canceled? That was funny, imagining that a rich and famous person would be held responsible for their actions.
Ellen will go back to filming during a pandemic, less than two months after allegations surfaced that the show was a toxic environment where racism and sexual harassment were normalized. Two months seems like plenty of time to have entirely transformed the power dynamics of an apparently unhealthy and harmful workplace.
“I can’t wait to get back to work and back to our studio. And, yes, we’re gonna talk about it,” said DeGeneres in a statement, Page Six reports. The show teased a number of guests for its upcoming season, including Tiffany Haddish, Kerry Washington, Alec Baldwin, Chrissy Teigen, Chris Rock, and Adam Sandler—unsurprising, given the number of celebrities who publicly supported DeGeneres because she was nice to them!
News of the show’s return arrived on the same day as new allegations of mistreatment, this time from a former employee who said they worked at one of the homes owned by DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi. The ex-staffer told the Daily Mail that DeGeneres gave her staffers a list of performance complaints every day, belaboring things as trivial as how her latte was frothed or whether the salt shaker was left in the wrong spot in the kitchen.
Daily Mail reports:
“She treated you like you were nothing,” claimed the former staffer, according to the report, adding that DeGeneres would “yell” and had an “incredibly condescending tone.” “She was going to torture you and you were just going to sit there and listen to it because you were being paid.”
The ex-staffer also said employees rarely lasted at the job for more than a couple of months and recalled one household manager who was fired two hours into the job:
“I was told that she had a very high turnover and that I should stay under the radar as much as possible, avoid as much direct contact with Ellen as possible. Working there was described as being more like a boot camp,” the person said, adding, “Ellen was the worst person that I’ve ever met in my life.”
It’s remarkable that someone who was referred to by one of her former employees as “the worst person that I’ve ever met in my life” was able to maintain her persona as the “nicest person on television” for so many years. I guess that’s Hollywood, baby?