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Top 10 Celebrities Who Tried To Warn Us About Ellen DeGeneres

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Ten celebrities spent years dropping hints about Ellen DeGeneres, and by the spring of 2020 nobody could pretend not to notice.

Top 10 Beyond The Screen’s countdown revisits the moments when guests, colleagues, and on-air exchanges quietly punctured DeGeneres’ “be kind” branding long before the wider public reckoning caught up. The video pulls together backstage complaints, viral talk-show clips, and a memoir passage into a single timeline of red flags. Watched together, they read less like isolated incidents than a pattern nobody wanted to call out at the time.

• Nikkie de Jager (NikkieTutorials) told Dutch media after her January 2020 appearance that DeGeneres was distant and never greeted her backstage, calling the show “a totally different world” from what airs on TV.
• Dakota Johnson publicly corrected DeGeneres on air in November 2019 after the host claimed she hadn’t invited Johnson to her 30th birthday party.
• Kevin T. Porter’s March 2020 Twitter thread soliciting stories about DeGeneres being “one of the meanest people alive” went viral as a charity fundraiser, landing days before DeGeneres joked on April 6, 2020, that quarantining in her mansion was “like being in prison.”

The Backstage Complaints

Kathy Griffin got there first. In her 2016 memoir, Griffin wrote that DeGeneres had a “mean streak” and banned her from appearing on the daytime program, a claim she repeated in interviews for years afterward without much traction. Nikkie de Jager’s account carried more weight simply because of timing — it landed in January 2020, months before the wider pile-on, and it wasn’t framed as an attack. She was describing what she experienced, and what she described was silence: no hello, no warmth, just a set that felt nothing like the show America watched every afternoon.

That gap between the on-camera persona and the off-camera reality is the thread running through the whole video, and it’s the same gap a former bodyguard had already described publicly — someone who watched the persona switch on and off from a few feet away, every single day.

The On-Air Moments Everyone Remembers

Dakota Johnson’s exchange is the clip that actually went viral, because it happened live, on camera, with the studio audience laughing nervously in real time. DeGeneres told Johnson she hadn’t been invited to Johnson’s 30th birthday party. Johnson didn’t let it slide.

“Actually, no, that’s not the truth, Ellen. You were invited.”

Kelly Ripa’s uncomfortable moment predates the Johnson clip by well over a decade. Back in 2006, DeGeneres mocked Ripa’s on-air chemistry with her own co-host, a jab that played fine in the room at the time but reads very differently now that it’s being pulled back up alongside everything else. Mariah Carey’s story is the darkest entry on the list: during a 2008 interview, DeGeneres pressured Carey into drinking champagne to force a confirmation of pregnancy rumors, pushing Carey to reveal the pregnancy earlier than she wanted, shortly before she suffered a miscarriage.

The March 2020 Tipping Point

What turned scattered anecdotes into a full-blown story was Kevin T. Porter’s Twitter thread. The comedian asked followers to share their worst DeGeneres stories, promising to donate to charity for the effort, and the replies piled up fast enough to become a news cycle of their own. The timing made it worse for DeGeneres: her production was already fielding complaints over how the show handled communication with staff during the early pandemic shutdown, the same stretch of weeks covered elsewhere in coverage of celebrities who forgot about their employees during the pandemic. Then, on April 6, 2020, DeGeneres joked on-air that isolating in her mansion felt “like being in prison” — a line that landed with almost nobody, given everything already circulating about how she treated the people around her.

The countdown doesn’t need to editorialize past that point. Porter’s thread was still active and still collecting stories when the video went up, and the “prison” line was still the freshest example anyone had to point to — which is exactly why Top 10 Beyond The Screen built the whole list around the idea that the warnings were there the entire time, if anyone had bothered to listen to Griffin, or Johnson, or de Jager, before it became a trending topic.