Ellen DeGeneres finally responds to allegations about toxic work environment on her show
Aux Features TV
Earlier this month, former employees of the Ellen show shared horror stories in a Buzzfeed report about the toxic behavior going on the behind the scenes of television’s most aggressively cheery talk show. While the stories didn’t usually involve Elle DeGeneres herself, that itself was a problem, as some of the former employees said that the producers keep her so separated from the actual day-to-day work on the show that she really has no idea what’s going on. There were also allegations of racism and a general refusal to accept any questions or criticisms from staff, often centered around producer Ed Glavin, who allegedly reprimanded an employee—a Black woman—for asking for a raise after she found out how much less she was being paid than coworkers in the same position. Just a few days ago, WarnerMedia (which produces the show) announced that it was launching an investigation into the allegations with a third party firm that would involve interviewing current and former employees about their experiences on the Ellen set.
Now, finally, DeGeneres herself has responded to all of this (via The Hollywood Reporter), admitting in a letter given to staff that she has “not been able to stay on top of everything” and chose instead to delegate responsibilities to staff members who she assumed would do their jobs in the way she “[would] want them done.” She goes on to say that this “will now change” and that she’s “committed to ensuring this does not happen again.”
Her statement and WarnerMedia avoided commenting on the fates of specific employees, but the implication—backed up by THR’s sources—is that she’s throwing Ed Glavin under the proverbial bus. He’s apparently going to be let go, as are other unnamed staffers, with one of the THR sources saying that it should “be like a new day” once he’s gone. Those sources also backed up claims that DeGeneres was “largely kept shielded” from how Glavin handled things, and based on her statement, it at least seems like she’s now aware of why that was a problem.
You can read DeGeneres’ full statement, which acknowledges the irony of her show—”a place of happiness”—facing allegations like this, at The Hollywood Reporter.
99 Comments
Oh, it wasn’t her fault, it was the fault of all the leaders she chose to represent her at the highest level of her professional existence, that’s a relief.
You guys, you guys, I’ve got it! We’ll call her… Ellen Degenerate! That is both a new idea and will solve this problem forever.
Didn’t Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or one of those jerks call her that like 20 years ago?
Or those schmendricks at Mad Magazine?
Some politician, can’t remember who. Her response was something like “yeah, good one. I’ve been called that since third grade.”
That’s actually a line in one of her old stand up routines. She’s on the phone with God and says “It’s Ellen….DeGeneres….yes, it does sound like that.”
I loved her old “Bob Newhart-style” phone call routine. Really excellent and worth checking out if people don’t really know her stand-up.
Howard Stern variously called her “Allen DeGeneres” and “Vaginfeld”
“We stayed up all night but it was worth it”
Her response of “not been able to stay on top of everything” immediately reminded me of a scene from Succession, where Brian Cox’s character says he’s “not operationally involved” in reference to allegations his company covered up rape and murder…
Well that was a nothing response that doesn’t accept responsibility. Roger Goodell could have written this. It’s about what I expected honesty.
My boycott of never watching a single episode of this show continues!
As does Ellen’s boycott of reading your comments. And only yours (“Hi Ellen!”).
“It has come to my attention that I have a reputation for abusing my below-the-line staff, henceforth I will redirect my abuse towards my above-the-line staff until I am no longer under scrutiny.”
Ellen: Moving on… who wants a t-shirt?
Yeah I don’t get what’s going on with this BuzzFeed article and stuff but this guy tweeted about Ellen’s secretly well-known meanness in which he donated per tweet about every story someone had of her being mean. She likely delegated poor handling of her staff specifically because she didn’t think much of them. The article would do well to bring this up instead of gloss over it in favor of juicier bits about racism and the like. There are first-hand stories of her treating employees horribly. They’re not taking legal action or anything, so it wouldn’t be worthy of a BuzzFeed Report but that guy had to pay sooo much in donations because he had too many stories… If she learned her lesson and actually treats her staff better, that might be good enough but I would hope she would address those stories, apologize, and then promise to do better going further. The BuzzFeed article could very well all be part of throwing this producer under the bus.
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked
HGTTG will never be usurped. I like to think that the writings of Douglas Adams will be revered in 400 years (assuming we make it past this current century) much like Shakespeare. Even more so, I know I’ll be long gone, but I really, REALLY hope there will be a conspiracy theory about whether Adams even existed or wrote his books.
Fascinating. Any opinions on British comedy troupes and their films?
May I interest you in the Ministry of Silly Walks?(Yeah, I realized my goof there and tried to edit but, ya know, Kinja.)
All good!
centered around producer Ed Glavin
Every other comment on this article needs to either be deleted or replaced with this one immediately! He’ll, pick any five other articles posted today and replace those comments as well. Perfection!
oh god thank you i needed thisi don’t even care about the article anymore
I’d give you a star but then it would ruin the perfect number.
“From now on, all my underlines will be permitted to meet my gaze, to nod, and if the circumstances are right, to mumble “hello Miss Degeneres” as my entourage passes. And visitors to my office are no longer required to chew gum from a bowl I have placed outside the door. They are now welcome to bring their own gum to chew prior to entering.”
It’ll look like Winthorpe walking into Duke & Duke in Trading Places.
What’s that about fish heads and rot?
stinks?
wonder what her cool brother vance thinks of all this.
Matt Lauer raped women for years and had an automatic lock on his door.Harvey Weinstein raped women for decades.David Letterman was a fucking creepbag for decades.Jeffrey Epstein molested children for decades, and was helped do it by rich and powerful friends.Bill O’Reilly was a sexist, racist creep for decades.Ellen Degeneres wasn’t attentive and was often hostile and distant to be around.ONE OF THESE THINGS DO NOT MATCH THE OTHER.Ellen is a fucking icon and a trailblazer, but she’s gay and a woman, so her “toxic” top rated set is now the target for all of us woke assholes to attack and villify her for. Because she wasn’t nice enough. So now she’s cancelled and we’re all supposed to hate her.Meanwhile, racist homophobic evil fucking men with incredibly lucrative contracts are still running free and being given a pass… and we’re all sitting around here reading masturbatorial “think pieces” like this and dragging Ellen over the coals because her producer is mean? Our president is a confirmed racist pedophile rapist, but Ellen Degeneres is who we’re cancelling and told to hate now? No. Fucking no. I refuse. And I’m not even that big a fan of hers, but this vitriolic and gleeful hatred toward a gay woman who’s done more to bring about representation for the ldgbtqia community is disgusting, and a symptom of how easy it is for supposedly woke people to play right into the exhaustingly overplayed narrative of scapegoating gays and women because it’s the easy thing to do. She’s now being held responsible for HR issues while the *****tiny***** list of men above and their enablers were never held to that level of responsibility?
Gross. Just fucking gross.
All those girls were hoes. They knew what they were getting into. They either wanted money or fame or both. So fuck off with your SJW bullshit.#FreeHarvey
Yah she still sounds like an asshole.
You do realize Weinstein is in jail and Epstein is dead, right? Also, while Lauer isn’t in jail, he hasn’t had anything resembling a career since the scandal. O’Reilly is essentially independent and supported solely by his followers, very few of which read AV Club.
You’re absolutely right. Awful behaviour is awful behaviour. Unequivocally. No matter who, or what, commits it …
What the hell kind of argument is that? ALL of the situations you point out are completely separate from each other and you are comparing a bunch of apples with an orange. I’m not a big Ellen fan, but she’s alright in the long run. And news flash, not everyone has to be besties with their boss.
Exactly zero people want her imprisoned for being a shitty boss. The only person I’ve ever seen comparing her behavior to that of rapists and creeps in Hollywood (and also Jeffrey Epstein? So I guess we’re including all the monsters in the financial circuit?) is you.It’s okay to report on someone being shitty to her employees when people do worse things as well, so long as the worse things are also reported on (which they for sure are). And it’s okay for trailblazers to be imperfect. MLK cheated on his wife, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t correctly thought of as an icon. Ellen DeGeneres creating a net good in the world (which I believe she has) doesn’t prohibit her from being a lousy person to deal with on a day-to-day basis, and we should encourage folks who are mistreated within the industry to speak out in hopes of ending that culture of mistreatment, regardless of the source.
To me that seemed to be an entirely fair article focused on Ellen’s response to allegations about the work environment at her show with enough context to inform those who are unaware of the facts of the matter. It didn’t even mention her reputed personal coldness or whatever. I certainly didn’t see any reaction like the ones to Weinstein, etc. Are you sure you’re feeling OK?
Hey~ David Letterman was a creep, but at least he admitted it! Respectfully,Loyal Letterman Fan
— Pretty much the reaction of most people. His wife is the one he really has to answer to.
not to split hairs, but among Weinstein/Lauer/Epstein/O’Reilly and, ahem, Letterman? …one of these things is not like the other indeed.
When you have a show named after you, you have to take some responsibility for what is done in your name.
Yeah clearly we live in a dreadful age. How can you stand it tinker bell?
Reporting on labour abuses? Yikes, AV Club, that sounds like bro stuff to me.
You are the only person who I have seen compare Ellen to Trump, Epstein, etc.Ellen sounds like an asshole and a shitty boss. I haven’t seen many calls for her to be cancelled but instead for her to.. you know.. not be an asshole and a shitty boss.
Nobody was comparing her to those guys. Like at all. You can get off your white horse
Jeez, you sure can read the room!
I’d be happy if they could read.
I haven’t seen any gleeful hatred nor overplayed narrative. None of that the rest of that rant has anything to do with Ellen. People’s perception of Ellen has soured a little because people on her show were being treated like crap and she ignored it or didn’t know. As it’s her name on the show the responsibility falls on her. It’s news because she has a reputation for being nice but she’s actually a human being who makes mistakes and ignored stuff she probably should have done something about.
I still love Ellen, she’s a great talk show host.
This is way too all over the place, dude.
This…isn’t a think piece, and in no way is it “gleeful” about the events, it’s just…literally a report on the facts of Ellen’s own statement. Holy fuck please chill out man
Such a weird comment. People can hold more than one celebrity accountable for their actions at a time, you know.
Pretty sure nobody’s suggesting we throw Ellen in jail. Hell, even a lot of your examples are totally different: Letterman being kinda creepy is NOWHERE NEAR as bad as what Weinstein or Epstein did.
She let her staff go during a pandemic, unpaid. In their place she hired non-union staff so they could save $$$I’d say that’s pretty fucking shitty.
The automatic locked door thing for Lauer has been debunked. He’s still a creep but let’s be honest please.
You are absolutely right. I am not cancelling her… but I am not going to start watching her either.
I don’t think we all have to hate her. I don’t. I don’t have many feelings about her at all. You are correct that women in charge often get the wrap of being “difficult.” The same goes for Oprah. I don’t think what’s happening to her amounts to being cancelled (but I don’t believe “cancel culture” even exists) but I do agree that this whole thing probably does have some gender-based foundations.
Ellen, is that you?
Your rage and logical fallacies will not save you.
ONE OF THESE THINGS DO NOT MATCH THE OTHERNo shit, no one said they did. They are both merely in the news. No one but you has made this equivalence.I’m guessing you like Ellen and this is the denial phase. Get over it. No one hates her for being gay and no one thinks she’s Jeffrey Epstein. She’s just an asshole, and historically rumored as such.
I don’t think anyone’s moving to get Ellen in prison or anything like that, are they? It’s more like she may not be as nice as her public persona. Who cares, though?She can be a trailblazer, etc., and ALSO be kind of jerky, right?From my limited understanding of the whole talk show culture, it seems like Conan O’Brien may be a MUCH better boss than Ellen (for example), as he apparently paid the salaries of his staff for quite a while out of his own pocket during a previous shutdown. (I think this was before COVID, and do not know what he’s doing for that)I may not have the details exactly correct, and you may know more than me about this.
So, the moral of your story is that it’s okay to be an unrepentant asshole as long as you can point to someone else and say, “Yeah, well, they’re worse.”Let’s look at your *****tiny***** list and see if any of them were held to the level of responsibility of having people say Ellen is a jerk.Matt Lauer – His wife divorced him and he effectively lost his entire career.Harvey Weinstein – Currently in prison, likely (hopefully) will not live to see his 2043 release date.David Letterman – Has done a 6-part miniseries for Netflix and pretty much nothing else in the last 5 years.Jeffrey Epstein – Arrested, imprisoned, currently dead.Bill O’Reilly – Paid nearly $50 million in settlements, got fired and then dropped by his agent. Also lost custody of his children.Hmm, yeah, I would agree that all the men on that list did things worse than Ellen. And yep, all of them have (very rightfully) had more happen to them than Ellen, who has had what happen to her exactly? People on the internet talk bad about her? Oh my!
not kissing Ellen’s ass is a hate crime
People being rapists doesn’t invalidate Ellen being shitty. Your comment sucks.
Yep, Trump has court papers accusing him of raping a 13 year old. His lawyers made it go away right before the 2016 election. It’s common knowledge with a google search. Yet the media isn’t saying. It should be pointed out in the news almost everyday.
Ellen being a shitty person has been an open secret in Hollywood for years. This notion that she’s pretending she doesn’t know what goes on on her set is total lies. Great. She’s a woman. A gay woman. A gay woman who has given money to different LGBTQA charities. But she’s also a shity person. My favourite stories about here are in this twitter thread. You can be a bad person without being a racist, pedophile, rapist and while I don’t believe she should be put in jail, she should be held accountable for being a pretty much terrible person and boss.
Letterman was a philanderer and never married until after his child was school age and did so for surname reasons more or less. The rest either had their careers ended, dead, or in jail because they were finally exposed.Ellen committing major union violations and making her business a terrible place to be isn’t excused because she’s a rich powerful white lesbian, I don’t really see your argument unless you think being a rich powerful white lesbian is a serious disability in America? In which case, let me inform you: It isn’t. This is why the LGBTQ+ community has serious issues because being in it and having money and being white offsets most of the other issues. Ellen treating her employees like trash isn’t acceptable and isn’t worse than raping people but is definitely up the scale from Letterman’s serial philandering.
WADDABOUT……??!?!?!?!?!?!1!1/Ah, PoetJunkie: “It’s OK for Ellen to be an arsehole because Epstein raped kids. Also, I have no idea who Ghislaine Maxwell is.”What’s your line of reasoning here? At worst, you’re condoning Ellen’s behaviour simply because of others’ shitty behaviour, at best your letting her use it as an excuse.Also, don’t throw that food away: there are children starving in Africa, you know.
…admitting in a letter given to staff that she has “not been able to stay on top of everything”Is anyone actually buying this bullshit?
Look at the top comment. Some people absolutely are.
Give her show to Dakota Johnson
Why her? I’m honestly asking.
DeGeneres on her show once gave Dakota Johnson a hard time for supposedly not inviting her to her birthday party. Dakota Johnson was nice about it, but pointedly insisted that she actually did invite DeGeneres to her birthday party, but DeGeneres blew her off to hang out with George W Bush and watch a Cowboys game instead
W?! Cowboys!? You’d hope just one of those by itself would be enough to strip a host of having a show. But both…good god!
Yeah that’s insulting. If she merely said I’m hanging out with a president or enjoying a football game that’s one thing. But watching a shitty Cowboys game with a shitty ex president? Dakota Johnson is nicer then me.
People should be more upset that she (and Bill Nye and Alex Trebek!) shilled for years for the oil industry in Epcot’s “Ellen’s Energy Adventure”)
That kind of behavior trickles down from the top. The reality is that you don’t get into her position and wealth by being nice. That’s just for the cameras, trust.
What about Oprah? Didn’t she, like, give us all cars, or something?
No, she gave us self-help and mediocrity.
Don’t forget The Secret and Drs Phil and Oz!
Yes, fake TV Drs. as well.
Yes, yes…other than the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what has Oprah done for us?
Brought peace.
Well obviously peace…
Oh, right.But I’d kind of like to see the Venn diagram on that. You could probably drive a car through it.
I helped myself. With the honesty of Jerry Springer.
she gave us lying authors too
That’s not necessarily true. What a dark world that would be.
The problem though is that Ellen has been accused just as much as any of the other higher ups.So I very much doubt this is the end.
This just confirms my long-held theory that Ellen is the real life Larry Sanders.
Of course some asshole ITT is stanning for an uberwealthy notorious douchebag.
I don’t think it counts as “throwing him under the bus” if he really was bad at his job.
The show’s a massive perennial hit, so I expect he’s actually good at his job. Just a tremendous asshole, which is why people in a position to do anything about it put up with it for so long.
Part of being good at the job of running a show is not being racist and opening up your employer to discrimination lawsuits and generally making all of your employees, and apparently a lot of the guests, really unhappy.
Ed Glavin, who allegedly reprimanded an employee—a Black woman—for asking for a raiseI’m split about this. On one hand, it’s obvious from how you phrase this that you want us to think a certain way about this action. I do, naturally, without your help. Capitalism is fucked.At the same time, I know the practical, pragmatic, society side of all of us – the side that wants to have and keep jobs – will write this behavior off as “just business”, and you have no real recompense for it, which is why he’s not in court, he’s just getting chewed out in gossip news.
Oh how Ellen must yearn for the halcyon days of the 90s, when you could be a ruthless capitalist piece of shit and get complete cover for it because anyone who didn’t kiss your ass was a bigot
See, everybody? Not Ellen’s fault. It was a man named Ed you’ve never heard of who will take the fall. Because when your name is on the show it’s normal to have no idea what’s going on in the workplace that has your fucking name on it.Bullshit ass-covering is bullshit, Ellen.
Brad Garrett calls out Ellenhttps://people.com/tv/brad-garrett-calls-out-ellen-degeneres/Also Ellen’s apology was not taking responsibility. She said she didn’t know what was going on then proceeded to throw people under the bus. An apology for other people’s behavior is not an apology from her.Lea Thompson backs up Brad Garrett. It’s been common knowledge in Hollywood how she treats employees.
https://popculture.com/celebrity/news/leah-thompson-ellen-degeneres-brad-garrett-common-knowledge-true-story/