Shadowing Practice: The Moment Ellen Was Exposed As a Monster - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Ellen DeGeneres might have had the biggest fall from grace of all time.
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Ellen DeGeneres might have had the biggest fall from grace of all time.
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In just a matter of days, her two decades reign as the queen of daytime TV completely fell apart.
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And despite her self proclaimed title as the nicest person in show business, there were some clear warning signs as to who she really was.
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Like when she pressured Mariah Carey into revealing her pregnancy before she was ready.
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The moment
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came all the way back in 2008, 12 years before the truth about Ellen would really come out.
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Mariah, like countless celebrities before her, had come onto the daytime talk show expecting some easy questions and some wholesome fun.
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But instead, halfway through the interview, Ellen ambushed her with questions about rumours that she was pregnant.
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While the audience were laughing along at the time, it's clear now just how uncomfortable this really was.
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to you not being pregnant if you're not pregnant oh my goodness
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i can't believe it by doing this ellen put mariah into
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an awful position either having to endanger her future child reveal
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her personal life to the entire world it's incredibly abusive
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and invasive to do this to someone especially on live television
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knowing what happened afterwards you see mariah lost her child later on in her pregnancy
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and subsequent interviews showed just how much this this moment affected her.
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In an interview a year later on with Larry King, she's nearly in tears from discussing what Ellen did.
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The wound was still raw.
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In an interview from 2020 with Vulture Magazine, Mariah Carey said that quote, I was extremely uncomfortable with that moment is all I can say,
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and I really have had a hard time grappling with the aftermath.
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I didn't enjoy that moment.
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What this did was show that Ellen's actions still hurt years and years after the fact, all just for a bit of gossip on daytime talk show
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that people only remember now because of how awful this really was.
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It's moments like this that make you doubt how Ellen ever got a reputation for kindness, or how she even got started in the industry to begin with.
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In truth, it was a rocky road at first.
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Ellen began her career and ended it recently as a comedian.
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For years she had great success, working her way up from comedy clubs into the mainstream.
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This gave her parts in films and eventually her very own self-titled sitcom.
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But in 1997, at the height of the show's popularity, she came out to the world.
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This was one of the first times this had ever happened with such a big star.
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And while her bravery was praised by the show business world, it also either caused or coincided with a sharp drop in the show's popularity.
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It was cancelled just one season later.
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An attempt at a different sitcom didn't work either and for a few years Ellen slowly faded out of the public eye.
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That was until 2003 when she got a role
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that would restart her career and kickstart her journey back up to the top.
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In many ways Dory from Finding Nemo was the perfect role for Ellen and her image.
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She played the scatterbrained but energetic and upbeat character so well
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that it felt like it was made for her and the massive success of this film especially her role in it, gave her the exact blueprint she needed.
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Ellen would then take this and synthesize it into a whole new vision for her career, playing a version of this character for the next 20 years.
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In that very same year, Ellen then began hosting the Ellen DeGeneres show.
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Her positive, innocent and energetic persona cut a stark contrast to the rest of the daytime TV landscape.
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For years, show like the Jerry Springer show had dominated TV with their focus on conflict
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and taking it as far as possible.
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But Ellen was seemingly different, with people describing her interviewing style as like talking to an
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innocent overexcited 12 year old as it gave this impression of a wholesome harmless show
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that was easily digested by the masses but as we find out later on it was all just a performance.
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Even before the truth finally came out though there were a whole lot of hints coming up to this.
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You see Mariah wasn't the only celebrity to have negative experiences on the Ellen show.
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Over the years there have been way too many awkward and toxic moments to count.
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As a lot of Ellens' jokes often relied at poking fun at her guests, whoever they might have been.
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And while most of the time this came off as good-natured banter, sometimes her angles of the attack would reveal the depths of her inner prejudices.
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Ellen actually often had a go at translators she had on the show, as well as the guests that they were translating for.
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I mean, just take a look at how she spoke to one translator in this clip.
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Just one question, just what else does he want?
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I don't know what you're telling him, but just ask him what I'm saying.
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Okay, sorry.
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Translation is hard on its own, let alone between a child and an adult in front of a live audience.
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Then, without any clue as to whether her assumptions are right, Ellen cuts off the translator mid-sentence like she's taking too long.
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Then Ellen would spend the next few minutes digging further into this joke, finally ending it by saying that she's lost interest and cutting off the kid mid-sentence.
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Hints like these were rare at first.
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Most of the time on the show, she was being kind, doing giveaways with the studio's money, and just generally reinforcing her on-screen persona.
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It was hard for people to see her slip ups as anything more than just a bad day.
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Meanwhile, whenever Ellen made audience members or guests feel small, they couldn't really do anything about it.
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Her fame and her power over the world of show business, combined with everyone thinking that she was this lovely wholesome person, made her untouchable.
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It was only sometimes when she had guests on her level of fame that she was ever actually challenged.
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Ellen's relationship with Taylor Swift was an interesting example.
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At first she treated her like any of her other guests, putting childish pranks on her and generally making jokes at her expense.
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It was after years of these that Taylor
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and her friend Zac Efron decided to get back at Ellen in possibly the most innocent way possible, by writing a song about it to perform on the show itself.
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Regardless of how you feel about Taylor Swift, it's kind of satisfying to see Ellen get a taste of her own medicine.
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She has to pretend to enjoy this while you can tell
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that on the inside she absolutely hates being upstaged and called out in a way that she really can't respond.
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The way she's holding onto her armrest so tightly proves how much she's struggling to hold herself back.
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While all of this might have just been speculation, Taylor's next appearance on the show proved Ellen was definitely holding a grudge.
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Later that year during Taylor's next appearance, Ellen decided to probe at a topic that struck her nerve with Taylor for years, her love life.
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In the interview, Ellen started out by implying that Taylor was dating Zac Efron, who she was just on the show with previously, before launching into a game designed to reveal Taylor's private life.
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You were here with your boyfriend Zac Efron last time.
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No, I haven't talked to him in a while, because we didn't date.
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Yes you did.
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Why do you deny it?
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Because we didn't.
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Oh, okay.
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So, which song is about Zac on the new CD?
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There's nothing really about Zac on the CD because we didn't date.
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Alright, so...
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Yeah.
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Okay!
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All the
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while Taylor is protesting about how she doesn't want to do this, that it's the last part of her life that's still private and that it gives a bad impression.
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It's exactly what she called Ellen out on before and she's almost brought to tears.
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It's clearly been designed by Ellen to take revenge on Taylor for calling her out.
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She's gleeful on how uncomfortable it's making her, while she presses ahead despite how much Taylor is protesting it.
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Taylor meanwhile knows that walking out would be a massive scandal for the tabloids, so all she can really do is just sit and take it.
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Whilst these were some of the more famous on-screen hints as to who Ellen really was, there were definitely plenty of others.
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Over time, they began to add up and slowly year by year, the illusion began to break.
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On air, she would often humiliate audience members regardless of what they did.
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One time they had a fake giveaway where people from the
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audience were told just to take one piece of Alan merchandise from a table.
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It was all a setup designed to catch someone out.
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When one lady took something extra for her sister, Ellen would replay the secret footage of it to the whole world just to shame her.
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Then she made her sit in a so-called prison right in front of everyone away from the main audience.
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So before the show I put out some Ellen products with a sign
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that said only one per person and I just wanted to see how honest my audience was, you know, but we set up hidden cameras just to make sure I
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mean any of you could have taken more than one thing and you didn't except for these ladies right here Listen, I really, I'm sorry, that's embarrassing and everything,
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but you know, let that be a lesson to you.
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Because you think...
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It is.
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You think nobody's watching you, and you just need to be a good person just because you want to be a good person.
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You go sit in that Ellen jail over there right now.
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Oh!
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In this scenario, someone did something marginally wrong, and Ellen took her response way too far.
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But to get on Ellen's bad side, you didn't even need to do anything wrong at all.
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One time a fan of the show sent in a painting they had made of Ellen and her wife.
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It seemed to be a lovely gesture born out of how much someone had loved the show.
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But instead of praising it or treasuring it, or even just ignoring it, Ellen called them out on live TV and made fun of the portrait instead.
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Whenever anyone put a stop to this or tried to outshine Ellen on her own show,
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she would react very strongly.
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Some people like Ricky Gervais naturally just showed her up.
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In a strange trivia game she made him play against her on the show, he beat her both of the game and made quicker, funnier jokes than her.
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You can see how much this annoys her, but she can't do anything in response because everyone else is also having fun.
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As time went on, little moments like these slowly led an open secret in Hollywood and show business as a whole.
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The fact that Ellen was actually not nice at all.
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It's actually amazing how much evidence there is of this from just her on-air performances.
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In the later part of the 2010s, things only got so much worse for Ellen.
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While on the surface the show did seem to still perform well, it wasn't where it once was.
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and years of keeping up this character had clearly drained Ellen.
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She stopped her iconic dancing, brought in guest hosts, recycled content and just generally put up far less effort into the whole thing.
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Meanwhile her ability to keep up the persona had began to fall apart.
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Mean spirited jabs that used to be well hidden started backfiring.
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In one interview with Dakota Johnson for example, Ellen pressed her on not being invited to her birthday party.
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But little did she know that Dakota was already well prepared for this jab.
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You turned 30.
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I did.
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And um how was the party?
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I wasn't invited.
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Actually no that's not the truth Ellen you were invited.
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Last year no last time I was on the show last
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year you gave me a bunch of about not inviting you but I didn't even know you wanted to be invited.
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Well who doesn't want to be invited to a party?
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I didn't even know you liked me.
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This one clip from 2019 went viral and did major damage to Ellen's reputation
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which was already beginning to fall apart in the scenes.
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It also showed the laziness that had taken over the show as well as Ellen's severely overinflated ego.
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And you can see how much it troubles her as it unfolds.
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She knows she just got caught completely red-handed, especially as she pulled exactly the same trick last year.
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By the time 2020 rolled around, Ellen's show was truly on its last legs.
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When lockdown came, it only upended things even more.
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Ellen's show couldn't continue as it had.
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I mean, you can't really sit down with people every day and have a live audience when everyone's in quarantine.
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But what was much worse for Ellen's career than the lockdown's effects on the show was how she handled it herself.
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Like other celebrities, she was fully involved in that whole imagined publicity stunt.
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Then she made posts talking about how she felt like she was in prison, all from one of the many rooms in one of her multi-million dollar mansions.
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Just the honest stuff we've already seen should have easily been enough to get people asking questions, but there were also tons of hints based on how she acted off set as well.
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In fact, it was these little moments
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that are likely to have contributed to her downfall far more than what happened in front of the cameras.
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In individual moments with fans and members of the public, Ellen showed her true colours.
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Each of these small examples of disrespect weren't enough on their own, but added up they created an awful career ending picture.
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Once this finally broke, it was going to be all over for Ellen.
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It was in 2020 that these experiences really came into focus
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when the comedian Kevin Porter asked people for their negative Ellen experiences on twitter, offering charity donations in return for each one.
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And he couldn't have ever expected the massive outpouring of stories he got.
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With over 2,600 replies and counting, it seemed like everyone in Hollywood who had met Ellen had something awful to say.
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So many things that you can't think for one second they weren't based on the truth.
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To list just a few highlights, there were tons of stories about Ellen insisting that people shouldn't look at her or talk to her.
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She would not thank or even acknowledge people who brought her things like coffee, or she would just completely ignore the live audience when she didn't absolutely have to talk to them.
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One waitress who served Ellen and her wife at a restaurant was allegedly insulted by her
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and shamed for having chipped nail polish of all things.
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A week later, she was then fired after Ellen strangely and viciously complained about her to her managers.
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And if that wasn't bad enough, the majority of the complaints came from people who worked on her show.
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There were numerous reports of a toxic working environment, racism, prejudice, insults, and people would get fired for speaking up or even just taking bereavement or medical leave.
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This all got the ball rolling.
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And from just one Twitter thread the open secret was no longer taboo.
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A few months later, Buzzfeed then released information from the first formal investigation of the show.
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It included far more detail and tons more allegations against the show and Ellen herself.
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While the reputation of niceness that Ellen had built insulated her for years, it backfired spectacularly once the truth became publicly known.
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Deprived of the very selling point and idea behind her show and her persona, she was forced to retire.
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After the allegations, the show carried on for one more tired season, Then it was cancelled, never to return.
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Now it's worth asking how this could have gone on for so long in the first place though.
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Fame and power obviously give people their own protection.
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But it's still a testament to the rot within Hollywood and show business that this could ever happen.
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Ellen built an entire brand on being kind and open, while undermining people, being rude to people, and treating them like trash the whole time.
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And it's not even just her, people like James Corden have also had similar allegations.
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But all of this makes her recent Netflix special all the more insulting, where she still plays the victim and acts like all of this was just overblown.
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However, these are the same techniques that kept her on the top.
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Celebrities that came onto the show only to get insulted or humiliated, they couldn't speak out.
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They're forced to appear on these shows most of the time anyway to just promote their movies or music.
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Then they have to endure whatever happens just to get some publicity.
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Ellen took advantage of this power imbalance.
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If they spoke up without enough proof, then they would be risking their own careers and reputation within the entire industry.
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Audience members and less famous guests were in the exact same position, only they wouldn't even be heard if they spoke up anyway.
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Lastly, there were the people working for her who were completely at her mercy.
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They didn't have any choice at all.
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Their whole livelihoods depended on staying on Ellen's good side or flying under her radar.
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It's this popularity contest and these social pressures
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that enabled someone like Ellen to have so much power and fame in the first place.
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What's more, Ellen used her immense wealth and fame to become a house flipper for celebrities.
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And this gave her even more influence in Hollywood circles, perpetuating her career in spite of how awful she treated everyone.
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This is how she spends her time now.
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Most recently, she bought yet another mansion in the British countryside, along with a ton of other multi-millionaire celebrities.
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While she might have lost her show, both Ellen and the forces that created her are still deeply embedded in modern Hollywood.
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Instead of being a cautionary tale, her story tells us that you can do pretty much anything you like as long as you have enough fame and power.
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When such a rotten apple can be declared as the sweetest of the bunch, you know there's a much bigger problem at play.
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And thank you Fume for sponsoring this video.
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Context & Background
The YouTube video titled "The Moment Ellen Was Exposed As a Monster" dives into the controversies surrounding Ellen DeGeneres, particularly highlighting moments in her career that have received significant backlash. The speaker provides a narrative that discusses Ellen’s rise to fame, her self-image as "the nicest person in show business," and the stark contrasts revealed through specific incidents, including an uncomfortable interview with Mariah Carey. This context is essential for English learners as it showcases conversational tones, emotional nuances, and critical reflections, which are valuable for understanding the dynamics of spoken English in media dialogues.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- "I can't believe it!" - A phrase expressing surprise or disbelief.
- "What this did was..." - Useful to explain the consequences of an action.
- "It's incredibly..." - A great way to emphasize feelings, be they negative or positive.
- "In truth..." - This phrase serves to clarify or present a reality that contrasts with prior representations.
- "Hurt years and years after the fact." - This phrase highlights the lingering effects of actions, useful in discussing emotions or experiences.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively use this video for improve English pronunciation and build your speaking skills, follow this detailed shadowing guide:
- Watch the video without subtitles first: Familiarize yourself with the overall content and context. Pay attention to the tone of voice and emotional nuances.
- Listen to short segments: Break the transcript into manageable sections, focusing on a few sentences at a time. Repeat after the speaker to mirror their pronunciation and intonation.
- Utilize a shadowing site: Find platforms designed for shadowing practice. These sites can help you record your voice and compare it with the original audio, enhancing your shadow speak skills.
- Focus on pronunciation: For each segment, identify challenging words or phrases. Repeat them several times until you feel confident.
- Reflect on emotions: After shadowing, think about the emotions conveyed in the speech. Practice expressing those emotions in your own voice, which is essential for natural speaking.
By following this guide, you’ll enhance your listening and speaking skills, ultimately leading to improved communication abilities in English. Shadowing not only aids in mastering pronunciation but also in understanding the emotional undertones present in conversations.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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