Yeah.
>> And those people are still being tortured to this day.
>> Probably.
>> They’re still in an underground jail.
>> Yeah, she’s feeding them to her staff.
>> You were not allowed to make eye contact with Ellen in the halls of that show.
>> And I am sorry for anyone who has been hurt.
>> Ellen DeGeneres has been accused of suffering from a rare disease called kuru, which is associated with cannibalism and is causing her to go blind.
>> A casual outing, nothing staged, and within hours millions of people were asking the same question, what happened to Ellen DeGeneres? For years she was the face of kindness in American daytime television, but then the allegations about her workplace began to surface.
And somewhere in that wave of criticism, a far darker claim appeared, a claim about a disease, a claim about cannibalism.
So, what is true here? What is rumor? And how does a talk show host end up at the center of a theory this extreme? Let’s trace it from the beginning.
To understand the rumor, you first have to understand the fall.
>> She’s a piece.
>> Yeah, he was like, she’s a mom.
>> Ellen DeGeneres built an empire on a single phrase, be kind.
It was her brand, her sign-off, and the foundation of a business reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
But in 2020, the story began to change.
>> It’s a rough one now cuz she was running Abu Ghraib in the back of her show.
>> Former staffers started speaking publicly.
They described a workplace where people felt afraid, where they felt unable to speak up, and where the on-screen warmth didn’t match what they experienced behind the scenes.
>> You were not allowed to make eye contact with Ellen in the halls of that show.
>> One of those voices was a former writer, someone who spent years inside the show.
>> She doesn’t seem nice, it seems forced.
>> Mhm.
>> People that are like that all the time, it she doesn’t seem nice, it’s very forced.
>> And that’s when people started noticing something unusual.
The criticism wasn’t only that she had been unkind, it was that the entire brand might have been a performance.
>> It’s like a beautiful name, Isis.
>> Ellen’s rough.
>> That’s a rough one.
>> like an old.
>> But it’s a rough one now.
It’s a rough one now cuz she was running Abu Ghraib in the back of her show.
That’s a rough one.
She’s out there dancing with Kristen Bell and in the back there’s people that are getting up on the rack like this.
It’s so weird when you see like a lot of people saying that someone who seems so nice is not nice at all.
>> She doesn’t seem nice, but that’s that people have a very poor judge of character.
She doesn’t seem nice, it seems forced.
>> A hundred million dollars in her pocket.
>> Well, 450 million according to Forbes.
Uh that’s a low estimate.
>> Yeah.
>> Because so now she’s out there saying I was run out of Hollywood.
She’s actually reportedly complaining about how hard it is for women in America with the double standards.
>> Look at Oprah, how hard it is for her.
>> Oh, but she’s got what like 10 houses Ellen DeGeneres >> Michelle Obama, look how hard it is for women in America.
They’re hurting.
>> They’re going to let her back in, Rob, because she’s a lesbian, she’s a leftist, and she didn’t hit one of their sacred This is the point where Joe Rogan enters the story.
>> You stood by Ellen at such a tough time.
After everything, do you wish you never supported her? >> I wish I supported her bigger, stronger, better, greater.
I was given an opportunity to speak on the on the stuff in Washington as as the as the gay march on Washington and stand up for what I believe is our right to love without gender.
And this is something that I wished that I could continue to say for the last 20 years by her side, on her arm, and I realized that she did not believe the same.
>> As the transcripts describe it, Rogan didn’t treat this as ordinary celebrity gossip.
His argument in essence was about the gap between image and reality.
A woman selling kindness while accused of presiding over fear.
>> I had a buddy of mine who was writing on Ellen.
Everybody kind of knows now >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> what she’s really all about.
And that’s another one of those like I’m so nice and I’m so sweet being behind the scenes.
>> Now notice what he’s actually arguing.
It’s an argument about hypocrisy, about brand versus behavior.
>> Hello, you haven’t been canceled if you are doing a Netflix special.
She got 20 million for the one before this.
I’m sure she’s >> It is not a medical claim and it is not a cannibalism claim.
But this is where things get strange because the internet doesn’t stop at hypocrisy.
>> We had a very special guest on the show several times, and his name is Tate, and he, um, thought that I was his girlfriend, and so I told him he was my boyfriend, which shocked my wife, and, um, but he was a very special little human being and just brought joy and life and laughter into every room that he was in, and I will miss him and.
>> When Ellen announced her Netflix special and was photographed in public, the reaction online was immediate.
>> So, she eventually got canceled, but now she’s coming back.
She’s got a Netflix special.
>> People described her as tired, older, and cloudy-eyed.
>> You were not allowed to make eye contact with Ellen in the halls of that show.
If you saw her what This is not a nice person.
>> And this raised even more questions because once people decide a story is about a hidden truth, every physical detail starts to look like evidence.
Reddit threads exploded, social media filled with amateur diagnoses, and then someone reached for an old internet theory and attached it to her face.
The theory was kuru >> DeGeneres has been accused of suffering from a rare disease called kuru, which is associated with cannibalism and is causing her to go blind.
>> Kuru was real.
That part is important and it’s exactly why the rumor spread.
It’s a prion disease in the same family as mad cow disease.
It was documented in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea and it was linked to funeral rituals in which relatives handled and consumed the bodies of the dead.
The disease spread through contaminated brain tissue.
Once those practices ended in the 1950s, the disease essentially disappeared.
So, the real history involves a specific community, a specific ritual, and a specific route of transmission.
But, the story doesn’t end there because look at what the rumor requires.
It asks us to believe that Ellen DeGeneres, a Hollywood host living in California and later the UK, contracted a disease that is tied to a ritual practice, one that vanished decades ago, and that it presents as cloudy eyes.
And that’s where the theory begins to collapse.
Kuru is primarily a neurological disease.
Its hallmark symptoms are tremors and loss of coordination, not simply a change in how someone’s eyes appear in a photograph.
And a diagnosis can’t be made from a paparazzi image.
>> she might have just been like a paranoid a little bit about somebody like hurting her.
I don’t know where that comes from.
>> Just unnecessarily not nice.
>> Right.
>> presentation to the world was like, “Woo, having fun at the office, and we’re scaring each other”.
And like, and I was like, “This is going to be fun.
We should We’re going to dance at work”.
And it was like, “No, no, no, no”.
Like, I started as an intern there in the summer before the show started filming season 10.
And I was like, “I’m so excited to, you know, like meet Ellen”.
And the other production assistants were like, “You will not Like, do not meet her”.
>> I called her out.
I was like, “Ellen’s not that nice”.
>> This was after you went on the show? >> After I went on the show.
>> What was it like meeting Ellen? And is she a good person? >> Let’s just all go back to 2017, where I was the first person to call Ellen out, before anyone else did.
>> You called her out? >> Yeah.
>> What do you mean? >> I called her out.
I was like, “Ellen’s not that nice”.
>> This was after you went on the show? >> After I went on the show.
And the world blew up about it, and was like so mad at me about it.
And then someone else said it.
And then it was like, “Oh my god, Ellen’s not nice”.
Okay.
>> Why do you say she’s not nice? >> I can’t explain it.
It was just really I ran into her like backstage.
It was like an awkward thing.
And like, the producers were really scared.
I was like, “What’s going on?” They were like, “That was not supposed to happen.
We’re going to get in trouble”.
It was like it was so weird.
She was like, “Hey”.
>> So, where does the cannibalism part come from? Transcript after transcript points to the same pattern.
One controversy about mystery meat.
One rumor about food at her home.
One disease with a cannibalism history.
Stack them together, and a narrative appears to assemble itself.
>> Ellen was involved in a file case involving allegations of consuming mystery meat.
>> But this is where the situation becomes even more suspicious.
And I mean suspicious of the rumor itself, because none of those pieces connects to the others with evidence.
>> However, Ellen has publicly denied all of these allegations.
She explicitly stated that she neither suffers from kuru nor is she going blind.
>> They connect only through suggestion.
>> Online speculation has merely twisted the normal processes of aging and common health struggles into absurd conspiracy theories.
>> Think about how this works.
We’ve seen it before.
Celebrities have been the subject of wild online theories for decades from secret illness claims after a single bad photo to elaborate stories about hidden lives.
The pattern is always the same.
A real controversy, an ambiguous image, a dramatic explanation, and an audience that wants the story to be true.
Now, here’s the part many versions of this story skip.
>> Health problems she actually faces include osteoporosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder OCD, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD.
>> Ellen has addressed her health directly.
She has spoken about osteoporosis, OCD, and ADHD, ordinary documented conditions, and conditions that people live with every day.
Her critics respond, “Why should we trust her given the allegations?” >> Some believe she is deliberately concealing the truth in an effort to protect her reputations.
>> And that’s a fair question about her workplace credibility, but it’s a different question from whether she has a prion disease.
Distrusting someone’s brand does not give you a medical diagnosis.
Those are two separate claims, and the rumor lives in the space between them.
So, what does the evidence actually support? It supports a documented public controversy about her show’s workplace culture.
It supports a visible shift in her public image.
It supports a comeback attempt and a public that’s divided on whether she deserves one.
>> Did no apology.
>> It’s just woe is me.
I was I was run out of Hollywood as she speaks from this grandiose stage on Netflix.
>> It does not support kuru.
It does not support cannibalism, and it does not support the idea that Joe Rogan or Megan Kelly confirmed any such thing.
Their commentary, as it appears in these transcripts, is about hypocrisy and institutional failure, and that may be the real lesson.
When people are angry about a real issue, a fake one can attach itself to it and ride along.
>> know why.
So, in your in my dressing room, you have the bathroom with a camera, so I put towels all over the camera.
And I went and peed in Kobe Bryant’s dressing room.
Cuz I was scared.
I’m sorry.
>> Oh, well.
That’s okay.
>> Okay.
>> I’ll get you.
>> Oh, no.
Don’t get me.
>> Okay.
All right.
All right.
>> It makes me feel so bad about myself every time I come up here you put like a different dude up there on the screen.
And it just makes me really question like what I stand for as a human being.
>> Which leaves us with a final question.
If a rumor needs a disease, a ritual, and a cloudy photograph to hold together, is it explaining the story or is it replacing it? The real story of Ellen DeGeneres is about a gap between image and reality.
That story is uncomfortable enough on its own, and it doesn’t need an invented
