(1of2) Former Employees Say Ellen’s “Be Kind” Talk Show Mantra Masks A Toxic Work Culture
Source: Buzz Feed 07/16/20 by Krystie Lee Yandoli #TruthBomb2020
Ben Kothe, BuzzFeed News, Getty Images
“If [Ellen] wants to have her own show and have her name on the show title, she needs to be more involved to see what's going on,” one former employee said.
Ellen DeGeneres has built her worldwide, multimillion-dollar brand on the motto “be kind,” with lavish giveaways and acts of charity. But behind the scenes, current and former employees on her leading daytime show say they faced racism, fear, and intimidation.
“That ‘be kind’ bullshit only happens when the cameras are on. It’s all for show,” one former employee told BuzzFeed News. “I know they give money to people and help them out, but it’s for show.”
BuzzFeed News spoke to one current and 10 former employees on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, all of whom asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution from the award-winning NBC daytime talk show and others in the entertainment industry. They said they were fired after taking medical leave or bereavement days to attend family funerals. One employee, who claims she was fed up with comments about her race, essentially walked off the job. Others said they were also instructed by their direct managers to not speak to DeGeneres if they saw her around the office.
Most of the former employees blamed executive producers and other senior managers for the day-to-day toxicity, but one former employee said that, ultimately, it’s Ellen’s name on the show and “she really needs to take more responsibility” for the workplace environment.
“If she wants to have her own show and have her name on the show title, she needs to be more involved to see what's going on,” one former employee said. “I think the executive producers surround her and tell her, ‘Things are going great, everybody's happy,’ and she just believes that, but it's her responsibility to go beyond that.”
In a joint statement to BuzzFeed News, executive producers Ed Glavin, Mary Connelly, and Andy Lassner said they take the stories of the employees "very seriously."
"Over the course of nearly two decades, 3,000 episodes, and employing over 1000 staff members, we have strived to create an open, safe, and inclusive work environment," they said. "We are truly heartbroken and sorry to learn that even one person in our production family has had a negative experience. It’s not who we are and not who we strive to be, and not the mission Ellen has set for us.
"For the record, the day to day responsibility of the Ellen show is completely on us. We take all of this very seriously and we realize, as many in the world are learning, that we need to do better, are committed to do better, and we will do better."
A Black woman who used to work on The Ellen DeGeneres Show told BuzzFeed News she experienced racist comments, actions, and “microaggressions” during her year and a half as an employee. She said when she was hired, a senior-level producer told her and another Black employee, “Oh wow, you both have box braids; I hope we don’t get you confused.” And at a work party, she said, one of the main writers told her, “I’m sorry, I only know the names of the white people who work here,” and other coworkers “awkwardly laughed it off” instead of coming to her defense.
When the former employee brought up issues of race and representation on the show and asked producers not to use offensive terms like “spirit animal” in segments, her colleagues called her “the PC police.”
When she started to speak up about the discrimination, she said, all of her colleagues distanced themselves from her.
“Whenever I brought up an issue to my white male boss, he would bring up some random story about some random Black friend that he had and how they managed to get over stuff,” she said. “He would use his Black friend as some way to say, ‘I understand your struggle.’ But it was all performative bullshit.”
After one year at Ellen, she said she asked for a raise after learning another recent hire made double for doing the same job, despite her having worked in the television industry for a decade. Her manager told her “they’d see what they could do,” but months went by and nothing happened, she said.
"They definitely don’t practice what they preach with the ‘be kind’ mantra."
The former employee said she was also called into a meeting with executive producer Ed Glavin, where she was reprimanded for her objections to the term “spirit animal,” asking for a raise, and suggesting employees on the show receive diversity and inclusion training. “He said that I was walking around looking resentful and angry,” she said.
After the meeting, she left work for the day and never returned to The Ellen DeGeneres Show. She said she has no plans to ever work in the entertainment industry again. For years, she felt “a fear of speaking out” but is now inspired to share her experience because of recent conversations about race in Hollywood and other workplaces.
“I feel like I’m not alone in this,” she said. “We all feel this. We’ve been feeling this way, but I’ve been too afraid to say anything because everyone knows what happens when you say something as a Black person. You’re blacklisted.”
The former employee also said her manager from Ellen recently reached out to her amid the Black Lives Matter protests to apologize for not being a better ally. But the former employee said it's too little, too late.
“I feel angry about the way I was treated, and I am always going to stand up for Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian people, regardless if they’re around,” she said. “I can’t not say anything. I’m not going to stop talking.”
There have been rumors for years about DeGeneres being difficult and how many employees feel unhappy. In March, comedian Kevin T. Porter started a Twitter thread asking people to share “the most insane stories you’ve heard about Ellen [DeGeneres] being mean.” The tweet has more than 2,600 replies.
In April, Variety reported that employees were “distressed and outraged” by top-level producers who didn’t communicate details about their jobs and pay at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. DeGeneres’s former bodyguard also recently said he had had a negative experience with her at the 2014 Oscars, calling the TV host’s treatment of others “demeaning.”
A spokesperson for Warner Bros. Television, which distributes the show, told Variety that the crew was consistently paid during the pandemic, although at reduced hours, and “acknowledged that communication could have been better, but cited complications due to the chaos caused by COVID-19.”
A current employee told BuzzFeed News that on May 1, the same day the story about the former bodyguard was published, executive producers took the rare move of holding an all-staff meeting over Zoom to address the negative stories and low morale.
“I think it is a lot of smoke and mirrors when it comes to the show’s brand,” a former employee said. “They pull on people’s heartstrings; they do know that’s going to get likes and what people are going to go for, which is a positive message. But that’s not always reality.”
Ben Kothe, BuzzFeed News, Ellentube
After working on The Ellen DeGeneres Show for nearly a year, one former employee said they took medical leave for one month to check into a mental health facility for a suicide attempt. But the week they returned to work, they were told their position was being eliminated.
“You'd think that if someone just tried to kill themselves, you don’t want to add any more stress to their lives,” the employee, whose story was corroborated by four other employees and medical records, told BuzzFeed News.
“Some of the producers talk openly in public about addiction and mental health awareness, but they’re the reason there’s a stigma,” they said. “They definitely don’t practice what they preach with the ‘be kind’ mantra."
Another former employee said they were fired after an unexpectedly difficult year that required them to take time away from the job on three occasions: medical leave for three weeks after they were in a car accident, working remotely for two days to attend a family member’s funeral, and then three days off to travel for another family member’s funeral. Each request was a battle with supervisors and HR, they added.
“That’s the definition of a toxic work environment, where they make you feel like you’re going insane and then you’re like, no, everything I was feeling was right. It was all leading up to this,” the former staffer, whose story was corroborated by five former employees and medical records, said.
A third former employee said they were given a warning for creating a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for medical costs that weren’t covered by their company health insurance and then sharing it on social media.
Just 24 hours after posting the GoFundMe, they said, they were called into the department head’s office and told to take it down because of concerns it might hurt DeGeneres’s image.
“They discovered my fundraiser, then got mad at me. … They were more concerned about Ellen’s brand instead of helping me out,” the former employee, whose story was corroborated by four other employees, told BuzzFeed News.
About one month later, this employee said they were fired after posting a selfie laughing with coworkers at the office on a personal Instagram story — a violation of their contract — even though others had posted similar photos before.
“Be kind to the world,” they said, “not your employees.”
Ben Kothe, BuzzFeed News, EllenTube
According to employees, there’s a division between staff members who work on the show: people who “drink the Kool-Aid” and are usually well-liked by producers, and people who recognize the work environment is toxic. Those who push back against senior producers don’t usually have their contracts renewed, former employees said.
“They hire people who maybe are inexperienced with how a functional, nontoxic work environment actually is, or someone who just wants to be in that atmosphere so bad that they'll put up with it,” one former employee claimed. “They kind of feed off of that, like, ‘This is Ellen; this is as good as it gets. You'll never find anything better than this.’”
According to former staffers, those who have “more likable” personality traits, who are willing to work the 10-plus-hour days without complaint, and who actively ignore how managers and senior-level producers treat others have been given new iPhones, JetBlue gift cards, and other swag the show keeps on hand from its sponsors.
“I remember feeling depressed and horrible and sad and just thinking that I can’t leave but I want to leave,” one former employee said. “Everyone was unhappy unless you were one of those people being favored.”
Some employees defended the show’s work culture, saying it’s typical of TV production, but other former employees with experience in the industry said The Ellen DeGeneres Show stood apart as particularly negative.
“We all have a kind of ‘this isn’t normal’ feeling about how people get treated there,” one former employee claimed. “And there’s this ushering out the door. Or your contract isn’t renewed the minute you ruffle anyone’s feathers. Or you don't show that you're extremely grateful and appreciative to work there.”
The employees who spoke to BuzzFeed News said they worked in a culture dominated by fear. One of them said a general feeling among staffers was “if you have an issue, don't even think about bringing it up.”
“I never felt like it was safe to go to my manager when I had issues — because this was the same person who would wait for me to go to the bathroom and then message me, asking me where I was and why I wasn’t at my desk,” one employee said.
“People focus on rumors about how Ellen is mean and everything like that, but that's not the problem. The issue is these three executive producers running the show who are in charge of all these people [and] who make the culture and are putting out this feeling of bullying and being mean,” another former employee claimed. “They feel that everybody who works at The Ellen Show is lucky to work there — ‘So if you have a problem, you should leave because we’ll hire someone else because everybody wants to work here.’”
And when people did leave — or get fired — managers never addressed the team about it, employees said.
“We had Friday morning weekly meetings, and sometimes people who we worked with forever just wouldn’t be there,” one former employee said, “like, they disappeared, and it was never explained." ●
Source: Buzz Feed 07/16/20 by Krystie Lee Yandoli #TruthBomb2020
(2of2) Dozens Of Former “Ellen Show” Employees Say Executive Producers Engaged In Rampant Sexual Misconduct And Harassment
Source: Buzz Feed 07/31/20 by Krystie Lee Yandoli #TruthBomb2020
From left: producers Jonathan Norman, Andy Lassner, Kevin Leman, Ed Glavin, and Mary Connelly pose with the daytime Emmy award for Outstanding Talk Show Entertainment for The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2015. Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
Ex-employees said one executive producer “had a reputation for being handsy with women,” and that another solicited oral sex at a work party.
Being asked to join the control room inside The Ellen DeGeneres Show is a coveted spot in Hollywood, but according to dozens of men and women who work behind the scenes, the office is a place where sexual harassment and misconduct by top executive producers runs rampant.
One ex-employee said head writer and executive producer Kevin Leman asked him if he could give him a hand job or perform oral sex in a bathroom at a company party in 2013. Another said they separately saw Leman grab a production assistant’s penis.
In May 2017, another former employee also said she saw Leman grope a production assistant in a car and kiss his neck.
Nearly a dozen former employees, who range from longtime, senior-level employees to production assistants, said it was also common for Leman to make sexually explicit comments in the office, like pointing out male colleagues’ bulges in their crotches, or ask them questions like, “Are you a top or a bottom?”
“It’s masked in sarcasm, but it’s not sarcasm,” a former employee said.
Many of his targets, employees added, were lower-level and younger employees who felt they lacked any power to speak up.
“He’d probably do it in front of 10 people and they’d laugh because ‘it’s just Kevin being Kevin,’ but if you’re in a position of power at a company, you don’t just get to touch me like that,” a former employee said. In a statement after this article was published, Leman said he categorically denied "any kind of sexual impropriety."
"I started at the Ellen Show as a PA more than 17 years ago and have devoted my career to work my way to the position I now hold. While my job as head writer is to come up with jokes — and, during that process, we can occasionally push the envelope — I’m horrified that some of my attempts at humor may have caused offense," he said. "I have always aimed to treat everyone on the staff with kindness, inclusivity and respect. In my whole time on the show, to my knowledge, I’ve never had a single HR or inter-personal complaint made about me, and I am devastated beyond belief that this kind of malicious and misleading article could be published."
BuzzFeed News spoke to 36 former employees, many of whom independently corroborated incidents of harassment, sexual misconduct, and assault from top producers like Leman. All of the ex-employees, many of whom had voluntarily left the show, asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution.
Warner Bros. declined to comment on specific allegations, citing an ongoing internal investigation that was launched after an earlier BuzzFeed News report in which current and former employees said they faced racism, fear, and intimidation at work.
But in a statement on Thursday, the studio said it "hoped to determine the validity and extent of publicly reported allegations and to understand the full breadth of the show’s day-to-day culture."
"It was important to both Warner Bros. and Ellen that as many people as possible attached to the program could be heard," Warner Bros. added. "The Ellen DeGeneres Show is, and has always strived to be, a place that brings positivity to the world. And though not all of the allegations were corroborated, we are disappointed that the primary findings of the investigation indicated some deficiencies related to the show’s day-to-day management.
"We have identified several staffing changes, along with appropriate measures to address the issues that have been raised, and are taking the first steps to implement them.”
Ellen DeGeneres poses with the Outstanding Talk Show Host Emmy award in 2008.
Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images, Michael Buckner / Getty Images
In a letter to staff that was obtained by BuzzFeed News, DeGeneres on Thursday apologized, saying that from its inception, the show was supposed to be a place of “happiness” where “everyone would be treated with respect.”
“Obviously, something changed, and I am disappointed to learn that this has not been the case. And for that, I am sorry. Anyone who knows me knows it’s the opposite of what I believe and what I hoped for our show,” she wrote.
Among the many allegations brought to BuzzFeed News, five former employees said executive producer Ed Glavin touched them in a way that made them uncomfortable by rubbing their shoulders and back, as well as placing his hand around their lower waist.
Dozens of former employees also said Glavin “had a reputation for being handsy with women,” especially in the control room, and managed the team through fear and intimidation.
“You could definitely see the creep factor and the creepy touching. That was out in the open for everybody to see,” one former employee, who said Glavin regularly touched her in the control room, told BuzzFeed News. “Obviously, no one wants that and no one wants to be uncomfortably touched by someone … but you didn’t want to piss them off or you would be fired, so it was just that culture of fear.”
Another former employee said Glavin would call over producers and assistants to sit near him when the show was filming segments they had worked on and, in front of nearly 30 other people in the control room, would touch them inappropriately.
“Even though I was being abused [at work] constantly, Ed putting his arm around you in the control room was like the nicest experience you had all day, as messed up as that sounds,” she said. “But you had been crying last night and now your segment is going well … and then you feel like you got credit for something from the executive producer directly. … That friendly banter accompanied by a friendly hand.”
Glavin did not respond to a request for comment regarding the allegations prior to publication.
In all, 47 former employees who spoke to BuzzFeed News said Glavin led with intimidation and fear on a daily basis. One former employee said when they turned in their notice, Glavin flipped over a table and chair while screaming.
Five former employees also said they saw Glavin use a button at his desk to remotely shut his office door “as an intimidation tactic” during reprimands.
“It seemed like a power move, more than anything,” one former employee said.
Ex-workers also said they were uncomfortable when Glavin used his private shower in his office bathroom.
“You’d be going into his office for an important meeting and the shower door is open and you’re like, that’s a little weird,” a former employee said. “The shower is right when you walk in on the right. Before you even see his desk, you see his shower. He’d be openly showering and going into meetings with wet hair.”
Another former employee said co-executive producer Jonathan Norman groomed him over a period of time by taking him to concerts and other work-related perks, and then one night attempted to perform oral sex on him. Three of the employee’s former colleagues on the show corroborated that he told them about the incident at the time and said they have discussed it in the years since.
“We’re young people who were forming our careers and were unfortunately subjected to a toxic work environment as some of our first jobs out of college,” the former employee said. “And some of us were sexually harassed and that’s what was shaping our careers our first year out of school.”
In a statement after publication Thursday night, Norman said he is "100% categorically denying these allegations."
"I have never had a single complaint against me in my career. I have never 'groomed' anyone," he said. "I have never done anything to harm another staff member. Ever. The person I believe you are referring to has ulterior motives for bringing down the show and has been acting with malice towards the show."
Adding to the void of accountability, former employees said there was no formal process to confidentially file complaints, and that senior-level producers pressured them not to go to HR at the show’s parent company.
“There was no such thing as a confidential conversation,” a former employee said. “There was no clear direction that if something happens to you, you go to this person, it will remain confidential, and you will not be retaliated against.”
A former Warner Brothers employee who worked with The Ellen Show said the company “turns a blind eye” to the alleged misconduct because the series “is a cash cow.”
"Warner Brothers has a responsibility not just to the people who work on The Ellen Show, but to its viewers and its shareholders to make sure people are protected on the job, and that they're not harassed, and they're not working in an environment that is toxic and unhealthy,” the former employee said.
Some former workers said they don’t think DeGeneres is aware of the scope of what goes on behind the scenes because she doesn’t spend enough time in the office or interacting with the staff to have a strong sense of the culture. They also said executive producers “insulate” her from details and control the narrative on set.
“Everyone acted really differently around her,” one former employee said. “There’s a show that’s happening behind the show, the show that the executive producers have us all put on for her when she comes to the offices.”
Justin Bieber and Ellen Degeneres appear at her show's bicoastal premiere in New York in 2015. Dave Kotinsky / Getty Images
In her letter to staff on Thursday, DeGeneres said she had come to rely on others to stay on top of the daily operation, but added: “My name is on the show and everything we do and I take responsibility for that.”
“As we’ve grown exponentially, I’ve not been able to stay on top of everything and relied on others to do their jobs as they knew I’d want them done. Clearly some didn’t,” she added. “That will now change and I’m committed to ensuring this does not happen again.”
But other former employees told BuzzFeed News it’s implausible that DeGeneres hasn’t been exposed to the same stories and behavior, particularly when they allegedly involve the senior-level executive producers she spends most of her time with.
“For someone who’s so involved in the show and the creative aspect, and having been in those meetings with her, it’s very hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that she doesn’t hear the same whispers,” one former employee who worked closely with DeGeneres said. “Unless she really is just in this bubble.”
Another longtime former employee who also worked with DeGeneres said the talk show host “doesn’t want to know” about what goes on behind the scenes, and “nobody wants to rock the boat” because she is essentially the show’s brand.
“She knows,” the former employee said. “She knows shit goes on, but also she doesn’t want to hear it.”
Source: Buzz Feed 07/31/20 by Krystie Lee Yandoli #TruthBomb2020
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