Ellen DeGeneres accused of bullying 11 year old and calling him ‘fat and stupid’
Ellen DeGeneres has been hit with more claims that she ‘took pleasure’ in being ‘mean’ to the son of one of her work colleagues before she hit the big time
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Ellen DeGeneres has been hit with new claims that she ‘bullied’ an 11-year-old boy who she called ‘fat’ and ‘stupid’, forty years ago.
The under-fire TV presenter has been facing mounting criticism for the ‘toxic; workplace culture that allegedly exists behind the scenes of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Ben Gravolet has made a series of claims against Ellen, who was working for his mother’s recruitment agency at the time, before she found fame on TV and Hollywood.
Speaking to DailyMailTV, Ben has alleged that the then 20-year-old Ellen would subject him to mean put downs, mainly surrounding his weight at the time.
Ben, 52, recalled: “I would dread going to [my mum’s] office to see her after school or on a day if I was sick and Ellen was there.
“She would criticise my weight. I would try to do homework in the office, she’d call me stupid, she’d call me fat. She would criticise my clothes.”
Ben continued: “I was just a boy and this was a grown woman who took pleasure in seeing me become visibly upset.
“I don’t think there’s any excuse for it. I was a defenseless kid. What could I have told her back?”
Ben said that he has always been self-conscious about his weight and said that Ellen’s comments had a deep effect on him.
He added: “It has an effect if somebody in a superior position to you, who’s much older, goes ”You’re fat. You might want to lose some of that weight chunky boy.'”
Ben claims that Ellen was working for the New Orleans branch of Snelling Personnel in the late 1970s, a company that was owned by his mother.
Ben said that he found it difficult to watch Ellen rise to fame, with people saying what a wonderful person she was because, in his view, she was “one of the most vile people I’ve ever met in my life.”
The 62-year-old talk show host has been hit with dozens of accusations about the behaviour of certain individuals in her team and that she stood by and did not stop what was happening.
Former employees of The Ellen DeGeneres Show spoke out to Buzzfeed about their experience and Ellen has since written to staff in a memo, in which she apologised for the workplace culture.
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