Ellen: cancelled by her own ‘be kind’ brand?

SHE’S ONE OF America’s most successful entertainers and a trailblazing LGBTQ+ campaigner, but Ellen Degeneres may, in future, be best known as the woman whose career was killed by her own kindness. Or, at least, for making kindness her brand. Having spent more than 20 years at the top, Ellen is now facing a tidal wave of criticism, accused of having a ‘mean streak’ and fostering a toxic workplace culture of racism and intimidation.

‘There had been rumblings in the TV industry for years and, working in entertainment, everyone knows someone who’s had a terrible interaction with Ellen,’ says comedian and writer Kevin T Porter.

He points to incidents such as Ellen’s now infamous interview with Dakota Johnson last year, when the host claimed, on air, that she hadn’t been invited to the actor’s birthday – only for Dakota to set the record straight: Ellen was invited but didn’t turn up. ‘The meme-ification of that interview is now shorthand for calling someone on their BS,’ says Kevin.

But it was Kevin himself who opened the floodgates when, on 20 March, he took to Twitter to call Ellen ‘notoriously one of the meanest people alive’ and appealed for ‘insane stories you’ve heard about Ellen being mean’, pledging to donate $2 to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank for each one. ‘I just thought the premise of asking for gossip in exchange for donations would be funny, a whimsical way to raise money,’ he says.

He got over 2,000 responses, including from writer Benjamin Siemon, who said Ellen ‘has a “sensitive nose”, so everyone must chew gum from a bowl outside her office before talking to her’. And actor and comedian Chris Farah tweeted that when she’d been a waitress at an LA restaurant, Ellen ‘wrote to the owner & complained about my chipped nail polish… almost got me fired’. As one Twitter user said, ‘As if the virus wasn’t enough, now it’s like finding out Santa isn’t real.’

While Ellen is far from the first star to have been toppled by cancel culture, the 62-year-old had further to fall than most. Since her very public coming out, on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997, she has been the most high-profile gay woman on US TV. With her wife, actor Portia de Rossi, she is one half of Hollywood’s most iconic lesbian couple. She has her own talk show, of course, where, at the end of every episode, she reminds her audience of millions to ‘be kind to one another’; she even has a range of merchandise bearing the mantra Be Kind, which helped earn her an estimated $84m dollars last year.

Last week, Ellen finally addressed the accusations, releasing a statement: ‘My name is on the show and everything we do and I take responsibility for that. Alongside Warner Bros we immediately began an internal investigation.’

Kevin says the misdeeds Ellen stands accused of ‘feel like a betrayal’. However, he also believes there’s a chance the star could recover her reputation. ‘If Louis CK [accused of sexual harassment by five women] can still tour, it shows that, when you reach a certain tier of celebrity, you are simply too big to fail.’