One of the original Rosie producers, Andy Lassner, remains at Ellen as an executive producer.
"What you had at Ellen are showrunners who came from notoriously toxic environments," says a former Telepictures producer who worked at the company in the early 2000s, "so what resulted was the worst of all those worlds.
"He was a hothead from New Orleans," recalls one Rosie staffer who describes Paratore as a "bully" who "set the tone for everyone else, barking and calling people 'fucking idiots' without regard for the humiliation or embarrassment of it happening in front of your peers." But Paratore also had his fans, including Ellen DeGeneres herself, who credited him with reviving her career by convincing her to do a talk show; and staffers at TMZ on TV, which he helped run after stepping down from the top job at Telepictures.
The lawsuit references recently dismissed Ellen producer Glavin, who started his Telepictures career at Jenny Jones and then went on to work at the company’s The Queen Latifah Show and The Larry Elder Show before co-executive producing Ellen.
Three Ellen employees recall hearing jokes invoking the N-word in the office in the 2000s and 2010s.
("There is no world at The Ellen Show in particular that a racially insensitive remark would have been tolerated," a WarnerMedia representative says. The recent WarnerMedia investigation into The Ellen DeGeneres Show also did not find a racist work culture on the show, though some staffers mentioned moments of racial insensitivity.).
Former employees at The Ellen DeGeneres Show, TMZ and Telepictures also recall frequent belittling of underlings.
"Ed [Glavin] created this culture where you would get verbally abused and yelled at and told off millions of ways," says one former Ellen employee, who worked on the show in the 2000s.
On shows including The Ellen DeGeneres Show, TMZ on TV (as well as the TMZ website itself) and Extra, non-crew staffers signed lopsided contracts pledging them to the production for any number of years while granting their employers the power to fire them at will, staffers say.
"It’s kind of a mental bullying tactic where people, especially young people, don’t quit because they’re afraid to be sued," one former Telepictures executive tells THR.
"They made everybody from a production assistant to an executive producer sign these contracts," another former executive says.
If you’re a PA living with four other people in West Hollywood, and this company says they’re going to come after you, you believe them." A WarnerMedia representative notes, in response, that "it’s pretty standard for production employees to have employment contracts — certainly everyone working on the show in that era did sign agreements; they still do." Contracts were, years ago, more "aggressive" because of a competitive landscape, the representative adds.
"The culture is 'This show is the most important product in America,' " says one former Telepictures producer.
The next day, he walked by my office and instructed me in a weirdly menacing tone to never leave before him again." If they complained, employees were "blacklisted and fired," the producer says, "ostensibly because 'people would kill for this job.' "?
At The Ellen DeGeneres Show, one employee from the 2000s remembered that complaints had to go through a "proper protocol": reported to a boss and eventually to an executive producer, but "if the person at the next level was afraid of Ed [Glavin], let’s say, that problem just kind of didn’t go away.
Then he’d call that executive or lawyer and ask what it was about," one ex-TMZ employee from the 2010s says.
"I was always told by [my boss], 'Never take a sick day, even if you’re sick,' " one former Ellen employee from the 2010s says.
The same was true at The Rosie O’Donnell Show, one former crewmember recalls, saying that taking a sick day was "tantamount to getting let go." A representative of WarnerMedia says that "all employees get sick time" and that Ellen staffers have been reminded of the leave policy.
Though crewmembers were prohibited from bringing friends and family to give-away shows, executive producer Glavin once brought multiple guests to a show where audience members received vouchers for flights on a new airline, according to several Ellen staffers.
The practice wasn’t limited to The Ellen DeGeneres Show: According to a source who worked at another Telepictures entity, "If we were going to give away 100 [of an item], we needed 110, and Telepictures executives got those extra freebies.".
A former employee who booked travel at Ellen remembers that on the second hectic day at the job, an executive producer’s girlfriend called to ask for flight "options" for a personal, non-Ellen-related trip.
When the employee responded, "That’s not my job," the executive "didn’t talk to me for two years, literally.".
Nepotistic hiring practices abound: Levin’s longtime partner, Andy Mauer, is director of talent acquisition and formerly the head of consumer products at TMZ; TMZ executive producer Evan Rosenblum is married to Samantha Billett, daughter of People’s Court executive producer Stu Billett, where Levin also worked; former Telepictures president and now The View senior executive producer Hilary Estey McLoughlin’s husband, Daniel McLoughlin, briefly worked for Telepictures as the head of a website called Luxaholics.com; and, according to three sources, Glavin’s wife, former Jenny Jones producer Deborah Harwick Glavin, remained on the Telepictures payroll during Glavin’s time on Ellen.
One reason Ellen was able to avoid airing its dirty laundry as long as it did was corporate synergy: TMZ routinely declines to report on DeGeneres stories
Five former staffers say that they were discouraged from writing negative stories about DeGeneres because, in the words of one, "she makes too much money for Telepictures." The informal rule against covering DeGeneres began when the host gifted a rescue dog, Iggy, to her hairdresser without notifying the animal shelter
Since BuzzFeed published its Ellen stories, WarnerMedia has made moves to improve the show’s environment
A WarnerMedia says "there is no connection" between the new job postings and recent stories about The Ellen DeGeneres Show and TMZ
Updated to correct that The Ellen DeGeneres Show recently added an additional five days to its employee benefits
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