Ellen DeGeneres Reportedly Had Employees Pose As Audience Members To Keep Fans Away

Employees on Ellen Degeneres‘ eponymous show reportedly posed as members of the audience in order to prevent fans from getting too close to the host.

According to a source who spoke with The Sun, staffers would remove their identification badges so that they could stand between Ellen and individuals there to see her when she interacted with them.

Ellen famously meets up with her audience in the “Riff-Raff Room,” a room where attendees who didn’t get a seat in the main audience get to hang out and watch the show on television. From time to time, she would pop back to the room to greet the individuals hanging out there.

“Ellen would regularly go to say a quick ‘hi’ but what fans didn’t know is staffers took off their IDs and pretended to be audience members, then got in-between Ellen and genuine audience members so she didn’t have to get close to her fans,” the insider said.

“I never knew why that was, I can only guess it was so she kept her own space,” they added.

In addition to that, they claimed that the producers always put better-looking people up front and the “ugly” ones toward the back to make sure that the individuals getting on camera were attractive.

“The show was always overbooked to make sure every seat was filled. There can’t be any vacant seats but they have to be filled with the right people, the best-looking people,” they said. “Audience hopefuls are graded on their looks.”

“Women were treated and judged by their appearance which is wrong,” the source added.

That’s not the only way that the audience was treated poorly, the source claimed.

One time, when hopefuls waited for hours only to find out that they weren’t going to be seated, many of them were upset and warned the staff that they would let Ellen know about the situation. But when the emails expressing their unhappiness arrived, they were simply deleted.

The insider said that the concerns about the treatment of the audience were apparently addressed since they last worked on Ellen, but they said that they were concerned that nothing had really changed given that the senior staffing there hasn’t changed.

The insider said that the whole experience left a bad taste in their mouth and they can’t watch the program any longer.

Ellen has been facing criticism about her behavior behind the scenes for months, a situation that she addressed on the opener of the 18th season, as The Inquisitr previously reported. She apologized and vowed to take the reports seriously.