The allegations against Ellen DeGeneres are getting uglier by the day, after she was said to be complicit in propagation a 'toxic work environment' on the sets of her talk show by a bunch of former employees.
In a shocking turn of events, a Louisiana man came forth accusing DeGeneres of bullying him when he was 11 years' old.
Ben Gravolet claimed DeGeneres’ cruel behavior traces back to when she worked at his mother’s New Orleans recruitment agency in the late 1970s, Daily Mail reported on Thursday.
“She would criticize my weight,” Gravolet, now a 52-year-old father of three and vice president of a New Orleans marketing agency, told DailyMailTV, the UK paper’s American show.
“I would try to do homework in the office, she’d call me stupid, she’d call me fat. She would criticize my clothes," he added.
“I would dread going to [my mom’s] office to see her after school or on a day if I was sick and Ellen was there,” he said.
“One incident stands out in my mind,” Gravolet continued. “I was sitting beside her desk. I was drawing, and she criticized the drawings. She said, ‘I guess that would look nice if you could draw.’
“As I watched her meteoric rise to fame, people would say how great she was and all I could think was she must be an incredible actor because she was one of the most vile people I’ve ever met in my life. Who takes pleasure in giving a child pain?”
Meanwhile Gravolet’s mother, Tana Robinson, backed her son's claim by describing DeGeneres, now 62, as "extremely rude."
She added that she was unaware of the comedian’s treatment of her son until recently.
“I think I probably fired her,” Robinson, 72, who owned Snelling Personnel, told the paper. “Had I known that was going on, I’d have punched her and then fired her. A horrible person does that to an 11-year-old boy.”