During a podcast interview that’s now gone viral, San Francisco-born comedian Margaret Cho opens up about her sisters in comedy, from Joan Rivers to Sandra Bernhard, sharing how they would always try to support one another as they broke barriers for women and LGTBQ people in the entertainment industry.
Cho can’t say the same for Ellen DeGeneres, even though the former talk-show host became famous for breaking barriers in the late 1990s by being the first star of a TV network show to come out as gay, and to have her eponymous leading character come out as well.
FILE - In this March 21, 2015, file photo, Ellen DeGeneres arrives at the 26th Annual GLAAD Media Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, in Beverly Hills, Calif. DeGeneres is receiving a humanitarian award, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is reaping the benefits. Producers of the People’s Choice Awards announced Monday, Jan. 4, 2016, that DeGeneres will be recognized as the Favorite Humanitarian at the Wednesday, Jan. 6, ceremony. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)During an interview on “The Kelly Mantle Show,” Cho confirmed the view that DeGeneres was actually never a very nice person to a lot of people — behind her amiable “be kind” public persona that she promoted on the “Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
“The public perception of her is more true,” Cho said. “She’s mean.”
Cho is referring to the public scandal and fall from grace DeGeneres suffered in 2020. DeGeneres faced allegations that “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” was a toxic workplace and that she was not all that kind to employees and to anyone who wasn’t one of her celebrity friends. DeGeneres and some of those celebrity friends — Ashton Kutcher, Katy Perry, Kevin Hart and her wife Portia de Rossi — tried to change the toxic workplace narrative, but they largely failed, according to Business Insider. DeGeneres ended up giving up her show in 2022 and she and De Rossi have since moved to the U.K.
Before, during and after the toxic workplace scandal erupted, a small number of celebrities spoke out about DeGeneres’ “mean” behavior, including Kathy Griffin, Lea Thompson and “Everybody Loves Raymond” actor Brad Garrett.
The latter had once appeared on DeGeneres’ show and said on X — then Twitter — in July 2020 that her behavior was “common knowledge,” Business Insider reported.
In his tweet, Garrett also said he knew “more than one person” who was “treated horribly” by DeGeneres and he dismissed her public apology, which she followed with an attempt to defect blame by saying that she failed to properly oversee staffers who were implicated in the toxic workplace claims. “Sorry but it comes from the top @TheEllenShow,” Garrett wrote.
Now, Cho is calling DeGeneres out. Cho, who grew up in San Francisco and studied at San Francisco State, has long been revered for her activism on behalf of LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups.
“She was like, a mean girl,” Cho said on Mantle’s show. “But also she would be real nice. I think she always had kind of negative feelings towards me because her girlfriends and wives always liked me.”
Cho continued, “Ellen was really weird and not nice to me for most of my career. I opened for her in the 1980s, when she was a headliner in comedy clubs and way before her big fame. So then later, when I would do her talk show in the 2000s, she acted like we just met.”
“And I’m like, what? Like, that’s weird,” Cho said. “We go way back. It’s so creepy and weird.”
One of Cho’s unpleasant experiences with DeGeneres was when David Bowie appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and gushed about running into Cho the night before.
“I had come to his show wearing this giant Chinese emperor outfit,” Cho said. “He was really thrilled about it and he talked at length about it. And she cut it out of the show, which made me so mad.”
Cho learned about this portion of Bowie’s interview being cut from an DeGeneres show producer, a good friend, who called to tell her about it. “The producer had to call me and tell me, ‘I can’t believe she did this, she cut it out of the show,'” Cho said.
“‘But you need to know, that he was going on and on about your outfit. He loves you,’” Cho continued.
“I don’t know if it was personal, maybe it was for time,” Cho added. “But still, I’m going to take it personally just because I decided to.”
Last year, DeGeneres made a return to her stand-up roots with a national tour and a Netflix special in which she told her fans that she was done with performing. She said “this is the last time you’re going to see me” and that she was “going bye-bye” and retiring after being “kicked out of show business for being mean.”
During a performance at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa in July 2024, DeGeneres talked about being booted out of show business before — in 1998, when her sitcom “Ellen” was canceled after she came out as gay.
“Next time, I’ll be kicked out for being old. Old, gay and mean, the triple crown,” DeGeneres joked, She acknowledged that she could be “demanding and impatient and tough” and “a strong women.”
But DeGeneres ultimately refuted the claims that savaged her career. She told the crowd: “I am many things, but I am not mean.”
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