Celebrities defend Ellen
As Ellen DeGeneres and her producers face accusations of fostering a toxic work environment, the celebrity brigade has returned to defend one of its own. Friends from Kevin Hart to Katy Perry have turned to social media to share positive experiences with DeGeneres, intending to shed light on her character. But once again, the endorsements haven’t helped her much.
Perry shared her support late Monday night: “I know I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience besides my own but I want to acknowledge that I have only ever had positive takeaways from my time with Ellen & on the @theellenshow,” she tweeted. “I think we all have witnessed the light & continual fight for equality that she has brought to the world through her platform for decades.”
BuzzFeed News reporter Julia Reinstein tweeted an image of Perry’s tweet, crossing out everything after “besides my own” and describing the image as “a suggested edit if you’re ever thinking about putting out a statement about your positive personal relationship with someone embroiled in abuse allegations.”
Ashton Kutcher chimed in by tweeting that DeGeneres and her team had “only treated me & my team w/ respect & kindness,” and that she “never pandered to celebrity.” In response to a reply arguing that statements like Kutcher’s invalidated the negative experiences of DeGeneres’s employees, Kutcher wrote that he understood but then seemed to double down on his original assertion elsewhere in the thread. DeGeneres’s wife, Portia de Rossi, and friend Jerry O’Connell both shared a graphic on Instagram reading, “I Stand By Ellen.”
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, O’Connell stated that he felt “compelled” to defend DeGeneres due to their decades-long friendship. Diane Keaton shared a photo from the Ellen show, writing in the caption that she had always enjoyed her visits. Alec Baldwin tweeted that she “has always been kind to me.”
And in an apparent nod to “cancel culture,” as well as last year’s Oscars controversy, Hart wrote on Instagram that the internet “has become a crazy world of negativity .... we are falling in love with peoples down fall.”