Ellen DeGeneres wants you to know that she’s kind, sensitive, and not at all the no good, very bad boss she was described as by dozens of former employees. Since dropping the news last week that her eponymous show will end after this season, DeGeneres has mounted a fresh defense of her reputation in the press. Her arguments have ranged from “I am a woman” to (relatably) “there are a lot of different buildings” on set for her to have known how everyone was being treated.
“I really, honestly, felt like, ‘I don’t deserve this. I don’t need this. I know who I am. I’m a good person,’” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
The vet of daytime talk, who’s spent nearly two decades on air, claimed she had “no idea” anything was amiss behind the scenes in an interview with the Today show last week. She asks viewers to imagine her shock, last July, when bombshell investigations from BuzzFeed News reported years of allegations from multiple on-set sources of “racism, fear, and intimidation,” including sexual harassment. In so doing, she’s asking viewers to take her word over, by some reports, hundreds of others who’ve worked for her.
DeGeneres’ more recent tone stands in contrast to apologies she made previously, particularly on the show’s season premiere last fall. “I want to say I am so sorry to the people who were affected. I know that I’m in a position of privilege and power and I realized that with that comes responsibility,” she said in a lengthy opening monologue. “I am Ellen DeGeneres. My name is there, my name is there, my name is on underwear.”
But many of DeGeneres’ recent comments seem designed to separate The Ellen Show’s cancelation from what some might call her own, which has been more of a steady pronounced decline. DeGeneres told THR she had always planned to wrap after this year, claiming that allegations of a toxic workplace, an ensuing studio investigation, the ousting of three producers, and a precipitous ratings drop had nothing to do with it. Whatever truth there may be to that is tough to swallow, given the host’s previous violations of public trust.
From buddying up to George W. Bush and Kevin Hart to withering under the open gaze of Dakota Johnson, the cracks in DeGeneres’ kindness-as-personal-brand have been multiplying for years. At the heart of each incident, and the main obstacle she faces now, is the apparent hypocrisy of claiming to be nice to a fault and then saying or doing shady things. Her tumble from that self-constructed pedestal may have been inevitable all along; no one is kind all the time, and certainly not people in positions of power.
As a woman and a lesbian trailblazer in Hollywood, DeGeneres has undoubtedly had to be tough, tenacious, and far from kind. Perhaps that would have been a more understandable (and likely honest) way of framing her response to allegations that her show was a toxic place to work and that the fish rots from the head. But flat-out denials only seem to push the public further away, questioning the trust she’s already breached.
“The viewers feel duped in a way that she’s not this nice person,” former producer Hedda Muskat said in a recent interview on the Australian program Sunrise. “The viewers are not going to put up with the backstage racism that goes on, and the backstage bullying that goes on. So I think the viewers have woken up finally.” No one likes to feel duped, as Muskat put it. And DeGeneres’ multiplying arguments, casting blame on everything from misogyny to the number of buildings on set, are asking the public to deceive themselves even further.
But everything has its limit, including The Ellen Show and its host’s goodwill.
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