Adam Carolla Slams ‘Mean’ Ellen DeGeneres, Says Her Staff Was ‘Scared to Death’ of Her

According to Adam Carolla, Ellen DeGeneres was not spreading kindness to staff behind the scenes of her talk show.

The radio personality, 61, appeared on the Tuesday, July 29, episode of the After Party with Emily Dashinsky podcast and shared his experience as a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show 15 years ago, explaining how he felt the staff were fearful of the once-beloved talk show host.

“Ellen has always been a mean person,” he claimed. “Ellen’s show, people were scared — real scared.”

The Adam Carolla Show host said the atmosphere was different from Jimmy Kimmel and Jay Leno‘s shows, which he described as “laid back” environments. Carolla recounted how DeGeneres’ segment producer kept checking to make sure he would stick to the pre-approved topics.

“He goes, ‘You’re not going to talk about meat or beef or anything like that, right?'” Carolla recalled. “And I go, ‘No, I’m not. I’m just going to talk about the stuff we talked about.'”

“And he came back 20 minutes later, right before I went out, and he’s like, ‘OK, but don’t talk about beef or meat,'” the comedian recounted. “I was like, ‘Oh, this guy’s scared to death. This guy’s scared.'”

Carolla said DeGeneres, 67, was never directly rude to him, but he could tell she was mean from how the staff acted.

“She’s not a nice person at all,” he alleged. “Not because she was mean to me, because everyone was scared of her, which means she’s mean. She’s not going to be mean to me. I’m a guest on the show. So, I wouldn’t know it from my exchanges. I would know it with how her staff was cowering.”

Carolla also claimed that when he talked to a writer who worked on the show years later — who’d signed an NDA — and asked what DeGeneres was like, he responded that she was “not worst person I’ve worked for” but was the “worst person I’ve ever met.”

As Star previously reported, former employees alleged a toxic workplace culture on DeGeneres’ show in a July 2020 Buzzfeed article. Two months later, DeGeneres apologized to her staff during the season 18 premiere of the long-running series, which went off the air in May 2022 after the conclusion of season 19.

Star reported earlier this month that DeGeneres had a conversation with English broadcaster Richard Bacon, where she addressed her reputation of being a mean person, according to the BBC.

“I don’t think I can say anything that’s ever going to get rid of that [reputation] or dispel it, which is hurtful to me,” she confessed per the BBC. “I hate it. I hate that people think that I’m that because I know who I am and I know that I’m an empathetic, compassionate person.”