Home » Latest » Celebrity » Celebs Who Treat Their Employees Like Trash

Celebs Who Treat Their Employees Like Trash

5

InfoSearched 43 0 Celebrity

9.1

SaveSavedRemoved 7

Hollywood’s “be kind” brands don’t always survive contact with the people who actually run the set.

Nicki Swift’s video breakdown “Celebs Who Treat Their Employees Like Trash” pulls together the investigative reporting, lawsuits, and former-staffer testimony that expose how some of the industry’s biggest names treat the crews, assistants, and producers propping up their shows. The centerpiece case is Ellen DeGeneres, whose decade-plus “be kind” catchphrase collapsed in 2020 under a stack of BuzzFeed News reports and an internal WarnerMedia investigation. But she’s far from the only name in the file, with Mariah Carey and NeNe Leakes both drawing similar accusations from people who worked for them directly.

• Over 30 union stage crew members on The Ellen DeGeneres Show went more than a month during the April 2020 COVID-19 lockdown without word on their jobs, pay, or mental health support — before being told to brace for pay cuts of up to 60 percent while non-union crews were brought in for remote tapings at DeGeneres’s home.
• BuzzFeed News’ July 2020 report cited 10 former employees alleging racial microaggressions, retaliation, and terminations tied to medical or bereavement leave, plus a workplace culture where staffers were told not to speak to or make eye contact with DeGeneres.
• Ellen’s ex-manager Stella Bulochnikov sued Mariah Carey in 2017, alleging Carey subjected employees to verbal abuse and habitual fits, while NeNe Leakes faced her own 2011 accusations of berating a personal assistant who then quit.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show Fallout

The BuzzFeed report didn’t come out of nowhere — it landed on top of an already-simmering story about how the show handled its crew during lockdown. WarnerMedia, which distributes the show, opened an internal investigation after the allegations surfaced and found what it called significant day-to-day management deficiencies. That investigation led to the August 2020 firings of three executive producers — Ed Glavin, Kevin Leman, and Jonathan Norman — amid concurrent sexual harassment and workplace misconduct allegations against them.

DeGeneres responded with an internal memo to staff admitting “the culture changed,” then opened the show’s 18th season in September 2020 with an on-air apology, telling viewers that things happened on set that “never should have happened.” The apology tour didn’t erase the specifics that had already gone public — the eye-contact rule, the retaliation claims, the pay-cut ultimatum during a pandemic — and it arrived only after months of reporting had forced the issue into the open.

Staffers were told not to speak to or make eye contact with DeGeneres directly.

Peers Corroborate the Pattern

What kept the Ellen story alive past the initial news cycle was the parade of industry figures who backed up the private reputation against the public brand. Brad Garrett and Kathy Griffin both publicly corroborated accounts of DeGeneres’s behind-the-scenes treatment of staff, which made it harder to write off the BuzzFeed sourcing as a one-off grievance. It’s the same dynamic that shows up across other coverage of stars mistreating the people around them — the private accounts tend to surface only after enough former employees compare notes, a pattern also detailed in stories about actors who treat their co-stars like trash.

Mariah Carey and NeNe Leakes

Carey’s case predates the Ellen story by years but follows a similar shape. Bulochnikov’s 2017 lawsuit accused Carey of habitual fits and verbal abuse directed at employees, along with claims that Carey routinely put her own needs ahead of her staff and even her fans. Carey denied the allegations, and the suit never produced the kind of network-level investigation that hit DeGeneres’s show — but the underlying complaint, a star treating the people closest to her as disposable, is the same throughline running through this whole video.

NeNe Leakes drew her own version of the accusation in 2011, when a personal assistant reportedly quit after being verbally abused, with separate reports that Leakes demanded production staff address her as “Queen NeNe” on set. It’s a smaller-scale story than the DeGeneres fallout, but it’s the same power imbalance — a star with the leverage to set the terms of how staff can speak to or address them, and employees with little recourse when that leverage gets abused. Similar accounts show up in the network’s own look at reality stars who treat their co-stars like trash and, on the fan-facing side, movie stars who treat their fans like trash.

DeGeneres’s show survived the 2020 fallout and kept taping, but the brand never fully recovered its old shine — the eye-contact rule and the pay-cut memo stuck to the “be kind” slogan in a way three producer firings and one season-opener apology couldn’t scrub off.