Ellen DeGeneres is facing a reckoning of sorts, one Hollywood rumors suggest is long overdue. But for every underling who (allegedly) wasn’t allowed to look her in the eye, or non A-list guest she gave the cold shoulder, there is a celebrity to defend her. I meeeean.
People reports that Kevin Hart has joined Katy Perry in jumping to DeGeneres’s defense against accusations of a toxic, racist, sexually abusive atmosphere on her show’s set. Apparently, DeGeneres has been nice to Hart, which I guess means she’s nice to everybody? Is that how it works? Hm.
“It’s crazy to see my friend go thru what she’s going thru publicly,” he wrote in an Instagram post on Tuesday. “I have known Ellen for years and I can honestly say that she’s one of the dopest people on the fucking planet. She has treated my family and team with love and respect from day 1.”
Indeed, DeGeneres did work to rehabilitate Hart’s image after some of his past homophobic tweets cost him his Oscars (remember them?) hosting gig. DeGeneres had Hart on her show to talk about how much he’s learned and grown over the years, and even called the Academy to vouch for him, though ultimately that didn’t work.
Still, your pal being nice to you one time doesn’t cancel out all the times she was not so nice to everybody else, and/or neglected to notice her show’s producers were terrorizing her staff. And considering longstanding rumors about DeGeneres’s bad behavior seem to center on how she acted differently around celebrities than she did all the little people, well, you know. Maybe everybody should find some better friends. [People]
Insecure’s Amanda Seales says she quit her gig at the talk show The Real because of the white producers she worked with who were incredibly tone-deaf about how to handle segments on race.
She told Godfrey on Instagram Live, per Bossip:
“I did a ‘Smart, Funny, and Black’ game on ‘The Real’ and I was so excited to get to play,” Seales said. “They assigned it to the one White woman producer. But we have three Black women producers and one Black guy producer. So, I was like, ‘Why are you producing this?’ And she said, ‘Oh because so-and-so assigned it to me.’ And I said, ‘But, why would you be producing this? You’re a White woman. You don’t understand what we’re going to be talking about.’ Now, she could have said, ‘Well, actually I grew up in this culture if that was the case.’
“I said to her, ‘Do you even know what we’re going to be talking about?’ And she said, ‘No, I just figured you were going to talk about it and I would just write it down.’ So I said, ‘Am I going to get a producer credit?’ Because to me, you assign the different segments to people who are going to be able to produce it to the best ability. And it’s like if we were doing a segment on the Sabbath dinner, she was the one Jewish person on staff, she should be in charge of that segment because she has the most expertise on that.”
Seales said the producer later complained to higher-ups that Seales was upfront with her. Seales quit the show in June. “I was being asked to not talk about certain things that felt like a betrayal to my people and to me as a person,” she told Godfrey. [Bossip]