Earlier this week, we reported that Ellen DeGeneres had been hit with disturbing new bullying claims by former staffers on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Now, things have gotten even worse for DeGeneres. Unfortunately for her, an Emmy-winning former staffer is speaking out to reveal what it was really like to work for her. Let’s just say that it’s an experience that he’s never forgotten for all the wrong reasons.
Former Staffer Sounds Off On DeGeneres
Greg Fitzsimmons, 59, is an Emmy-nominated comedian who worked on The Ellen DeGeneres Show for the first two years after it premiered back in 2003.
“She was rough,” Fitzsimmons admitted of DeGeneres, 67, while appearing on the “We Might Be Drunk” podcast. “She was the C-word.”
“First of all, I wanted to write for her because I really do think she’s one of the great comics,” he explained. “She was a great comic. Then, the show comes out and I get approached by the head writer and turns out I am good friends with the show runner. So I write a couple pages of jokes and I get hired.”
Fitzsimmons remembers liking the atmosphere on the show at first.
“We were there for like a month before the show launched, figuring out the segments and all that stuff, and it was like fun, goofy, pranks,” he recounted. “A ping-pong table and it was all good energy.”
“The show was good, and I knew things were going to go wrong because I was a producer, writer, and then they asked me to do the audience warm-up,” he added.
Things Take A Turn For The Worse
DeGeneres had rejected every other professional warmup guy in Los Angeles. This left the spot open for Fitzsimmons.
“She said, ‘Greg, you’re going to do it,’” he continued. “And I was like, ‘I don’t want to be the warmup guy on a daytime talk show,’ and they were like, ‘Well it’s an extra four grand a week and it’s 10 minutes a day.’”
Once he stepped into this role, Fitzsimmons found that the audience was a “bunch of closeted mid-western housewives who loved her.” This meant that instead of warming them up, he had to warm them down.
Fitzsimmons decided to tell the audience to do the wave whenever he said the word “banana.”
“So then she comes out to do the monologue, but what I had forgotten was that the word banana was in the monologue,” he stated. “Now, she hasn’t seen the warmup. So she says banana, and the crowd does the wave, and she’s a control freak, so this is like the worst thing that could ever happen. She stops and goes ‘Okay, that’s weird. Whatever that was, don’t do that.”
Despite this, when DeGeneres said the word “banana” again, the audience repeated the wave.
“She said ‘don’t do it.’ They do it again. Finally, I just go up on stage and I explain to her what happened. And she was seething,” Fitzsimmons said. “I thought, ‘Alright, I’m getting fired for that.’ And I didn’t, but then everything got weird and we started winning Emmys. I won four Emmys on the show, but that made things bad.”
‘A Lot Of Crying’ Among Staffers
As the show won more awards, DeGeneres became “mean because she was back on top,” according to Fitzsimmons.
“If you didn’t pitch in her wheelhouse, then she looked at you like you had just stabbed her puppy,” he recalled. “Then there was this process of pushing people out of the circle. You want to be in the circle because there is a lot of fear going on. So you’re in or out.”
Since he was already experienced in Hollywood, this “really bother me that much.” For the newer writers, however, it was a nightmarish experience.
Fitzsimmons concluded by saying that he “had written on a lot of shows before, and I knew what it was like to have tough bosses. I wrote for Bill Maher I was tough enough, but then there were these first-time writers who cried. It was a lot of crying always.”
DeGeneres’ Toxic Workplace Scandal
The Ellen DeGeneres Show ran from 2003 until 2022. For much of that time, DeGeneres was lovingly known as the “Queen of Nice.” She even closed out each episode of her show by telling her viewers to “be kind” to one another.
That all changed in 2020, when DeGeneres was accused of presiding over a workplace at her talk show that was full of racism, sexism, and bullying. It was even alleged that her own staffers were told to never make eye contact with DeGeneres.
In the years since her talk show went off the air, DeGeneres has complained that she was “kicked out of show business” for being “mean.”
“The hate went on for a long time. And I would try to avoid looking at the news,” DeGeneres claimed last year. “The ‘be kind’ girl wasn’t kind. That was the headline.”
DeGeneres Flees America
This played a major role in DeGeneres fleeing the country at the end of 2024. She’s settled in England with her wife Portia de Rossi, 52.
“Ellen really felt she had made her mark on the industry. But that was diminished when she was canceled over her alleged treatment of her staff,” a source told Daily Mail back in November. “Then to have celebrities call her out one by one was so hurtful.”
The insider went on to say that the “all the ill will towards” DeGeneres in America partly led to her decision to leave the country.
“She has the one person that still loves her, Portia, and she is ready to leave everyone who in her mind left her hanging out to dry. If she considers it her retirement, so be it,” the source continued. “An enormous part of the U.S. doesn’t like her because of her sexual preferences. And others were turned off by her persona, which some perceived to be fake in the wake of the work place allegations.”
“For Ellen, it’s easier to move away from her problems than to confront them,” this insider concluded. “It seems like a sad end to what she once was in people’s minds.”
When DeGeneres fled America, she was hoping that she could leave her negative past behind as well. That’s why she’s undoubtedly extremely displeased that someone like Fitzsimmons is speaking out to remind the world of her alleged negative past behavior.
In the end, this serves as a reminder that karma really will follow a person wherever they go. Sorry, Ellen: you can run, but you can’t hide from your past!