Ellen DeGeneres targeted by burglars who stole jewellery and watches from her mansion
Ellen DeGeneres broadcasting her chat show from home. (YouTube/The Ellen Show)
Poor Ellen DeGeneres. As a volley of former and current employees accuse the daytime talk show host of mean and racist behaviour, it’s now been alleged that her £21 million 8,100-square-foot mansion in California has been burgled.
The estate, authorities claimed, was broken into 4 July, with investigators believing it was targeted “due to the victim’s celebrity status”.
Home-breakers stormed the property in the palatial Montecito neighbourhood, dotted with cavernous celebrity homes, and grabbed several high-value jewellery and watches, according to KEYT.
Ellen DeGeneres sees ‘watches and jewellery’ swiped from her sprawling £21 million Californian mansion.
The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office is leading the search. It remains unclear whether DeGeneres and wife Portia de Rossi were at home at the time of the break-in.
Moreover, officers are considering whether the theft is in any way connected to a string of other celebrity burglaries.
The lush garden plants and rising windows of the 62-year-old’s home have become a regular fixture in her eponymous The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which relocated to her Balinese-style mansion amid the coronavirus pandemic, where she compared living there to “prison”.
Ellen DeGeneres, after production of her show was suspended due to coronavirus, is back and is filming from her Los Angeles living room. (YouTube/The Ellen Show)
In recent weeks, DeGeneres has seen her employees levee prickly accusations towards her, where staffers have claimed the host’s happy persona is “bulls**t [that] only happens when the cameras are on”.
Her sparkling reputation has increasingly become a tinderbox topic for many, as staff claim she fired people for attending family funerals, that senior producers were routinely racist and, overall, direct managers instructed lower-ranking employees not to speak to the entertainer if they saw her around the office.
The flood gates opened this year after one of Ellen’s ex-employees, Kevin T Porter, described her as “one of the meanest people alive” in a winding Twitter thread.
Ellen show producers: ‘We realise, as many in the world are learning, that we need to do better.’
In a statement to BuzzFeed, The Ellen DeGeneres Show’s executive producers Ed Glavin, Mary Connelly and Andy Lassner said: “Over the course of nearly two decades, 3,000 episodes, and employing more than 1,000 staff members, we have strived to create an open, safe, and inclusive work environment.
“We are truly heartbroken and sorry to learn that even one person in our production family has had a negative experience. It’s not who we are and not who we strive to be, and not the mission Ellen has set for us.
“For the record, the day to day responsibility of the Ellen show is completely on us. We take all of this very seriously and we realise, as many in the world are learning, that we need to do better, are committed to do better, and we will do better.”
