Margaret Cho has spoken out against fellow comedian Ellen DeGeneres, accusing the former TV host of being “mean” to her throughout most of her career.
Cho, 56, made the claims during a recent interview on Kelly Mantle’s self-titled podcast.
Asked her thoughts on DeGeneres, 67, the Drop Dead Diva alum, took a moment’s pause before sharing that she found it “so weird now that the public’s perception of [DeGeneres] is more true — she’s mean.”
“She was like, a mean girl. But also she would be real nice,” Cho said, adding that she thinks DeGeneres “always had kind of negative feelings towards me because her girlfriends and wives always liked me.”
“Ellen was really weird and not nice to me for most of my career,” the stand-up comedian continued.
“I opened for her in the 1980s, when she was a headliner in comedy clubs and way before her big fame,” Cho recalled, “so then later, when I would do her talk show in the 2000s, she acted like we just met.”
“And I’m like, b****, what? Like, that’s weird,” the All-American Girl star said. “We go way back. It’s so creepy and weird.”
The Independent has contacted DeGeneres’s representative for comment.
In recent years, DeGeneres’s public persona has been called into question amid rumors that she mistreated her employees and was not as nice as she appeared onscreen during the run of her eponymous daytime talk show.
She denied the long-circulating rumors in a rare 2018 interview with The New York Times, titled “Ellen DeGeneres Is Not as Nice as You Think.”
“That bugs me if someone is saying that because it’s an outright lie,” she said. “The first day I said: ‘The one thing I want is everyone here to be happy and proud of where they work, and if not, don’t work here.’ No one is going to raise their voice or not be grateful. That’s the rule to this day.”
DeGeneres’s talk show run came to an abrupt end in 2022 after nearly two decades following allegations of a toxic workplace environment. She has since retired from comedy.
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“This is the last time you’re going to see me. After my Netflix special, I’m done,” she said during a July 2024 stand-up show in Santa Rosa, California.
Additionally, she said she had been “kicked out of show business for being mean” and confessed that she can be “demanding and impatient and tough.”
“I am a strong woman. I am many things, but I am not mean,” she insisted.
DeGeneres and her wife, Portia de Rossi, are now living in the UK, where they relocated in November, months after she released her final stand-up special, For Your Approval.
