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Bodyguard Reveals Ellen DeGeneres Is Nothing Like She Seems

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Ellen DeGeneres built a brand on being the nicest person in show business, but her own bodyguard says that was never the whole story.

Tom Majercak spent years working executive protection for celebrities through Security Imagery Specialists, and in early May 2020 he decided to go public about one client in particular. He was assigned to protect DeGeneres, her mother Betty, and her wife Portia de Rossi throughout the 86th Academy Awards in 2014, and he told Fox News the experience left him with a very different impression of the talk show host than the one millions of viewers see every afternoon.

• Majercak protected DeGeneres, her mother Betty, and Portia de Rossi at the 2014 Oscars and the Governors Ball after-party, and says de Rossi was warm and conversational while DeGeneres gave him only a dismissive side glance.
• He called her on-screen persona a “false facade and bravado” and said she was the only celebrity among the many he’s guarded who never once said hello.
• He decided to speak up after an April 2020 Variety report detailed outrage from more than 30 Ellen DeGeneres Show crew members left in the dark on pay and hours during the COVID-19 shutdown, and after NikkieTutorials described DeGeneres as distant off-camera.

Key Events of 2014 Oscars

Majercak’s job that night was straightforward: get DeGeneres, Betty, and Portia de Rossi safely through the ceremony and the after-party. He said de Rossi treated him like a person, striking up conversation and acting, in his words, “very pleasant.” DeGeneres did not. When de Rossi introduced him to her wife, he says DeGeneres offered nothing more than a glance out of the corner of her eye — no hello, no thank-you for looking after her family.

“It started going negatively when [De Rossi] introduced me to Ellen and Ellen pretty much just gave me a side glance out of her eye and didn’t even say ‘hello’ or ‘thank you for protecting my mother, my wife and me,'” Majercak told Fox News. At the Governors Ball afterward, he said DeGeneres limited her conversations strictly to guests who’d been pre-cleared to approach her table.

A Bodyguard’s Verdict on the Public Persona

Majercak’s central claim isn’t just that DeGeneres was rude in one instance — it’s that the warmth audiences associate with her is manufactured for the cameras. “I see this person come across as being very enlightened and positive and awesome and everybody loves her and is in awe and that’s really not the case when you meet her in person,” he said. “When you see her on TV, people fall in love with her but it is a false facade and bravado.”

“Ellen is the one person that I’ve been assigned to and I’ve been assigned to quite a few celebrities that has never taken the time to say hi to me.”

He went further, arguing that the pattern extends beyond a single red-carpet snub. “She doesn’t care about anybody else as long as she’s getting what she wants,” he said, adding that current accounts from her staff only confirm what he’d suspected since 2014: “People are starting to see her true self and that really lends to the support of what my initial thoughts of her have been over the last six years.”

The Backdrop: A Crew in the Dark

Majercak’s decision to talk didn’t come out of nowhere. Variety reported that more than 30 employees on The Ellen DeGeneres Show were “outraged over their treatment from top producers,” saying they’d gone more than a month during the coronavirus production shutdown without clear answers on pay, hours, or health protections. That reporting is part of a broader pattern of stars accused of losing touch with the people working under them during the pandemic — a theme that’s played out across several high-profile cases involving celebrities and their staff.

Dutch YouTuber Nikkie de Jager, known as NikkieTutorials, added her own account after her January appearance on the show. Asked directly whether DeGeneres was “distant and cold,” she confirmed it: “Just a little… It was a huge honor to be on that stage with Ellen, but it wasn’t as nice as I thought.” She said she’d expected a red-carpet welcome and instead got “an angry intern who was a bit overworked,” joking, “I was expecting a Disney show, but got Teletubbies after dark.” Majercak’s story is one more entry in what’s become a growing list of people describing the same gap between the on-camera Ellen and the real one.

The Split Reaction

Not everyone treated Majercak’s account as damning. Reaction split fast, with plenty of pushback questioning why a bodyguard would expect friendship rather than a paycheck. “He’s [crying] because she did not speak to him. Why do people expect her to be like she is on her show 24hrs a day. She’s human. Damn,” one person wrote. Another was blunter: “He’s paid to protect her, not be her bestie.”

Others sided with Majercak, framing his account as confirmation of something they’d already suspected. “Ellen has done a lot of good. However, she does a lot of mean passive-aggressive stuff that just rubs me the wrong way (like the way she enjoys frightening her guests and even her own staff),” one Twitter user wrote, while another simply put it: “Everyone knows she’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Majercak hasn’t said whether he’s spoken to anyone at the show since the story broke, and DeGeneres hasn’t addressed his specific claims. But between the Variety report on her crew, Nikkie’s comments, and now a former Oscars bodyguard going on record, the gap between the daytime-TV Ellen and the backstage Ellen has become the story the show can’t shake heading into whatever comes next for its 18th season.