Man Claims 20-Year-Old Ellen DeGeneres Was His Childhood Bully!

If this is all true, this is really not a good look for Ellen DeGeneres!

The 62-year-old TV host is going through a professional crisis of epic proportion after multiple former staffers have come forward throughout the summer to reveal accusations of a toxic workplace environment on her eponymous talk show. And on Thursday, the accusations continue, only this time it’s about something far further back in Ellen’s past when she was growing up in Louisiana.

In a new interview with DailyMailTV, a New Orleans marketing firm executive named Ben Gravolet has revealed that Ellen — yes, the very same world-famous comedian and TV host — was his childhood bully when he was just an 11-year-old kid back in the ’70s.

He claimed DeGeneres worked for his mother’s recruitment agency at one point during that time, placing her in her very early 20s. Gravolet, an overweight child at 11, recalled how the embattled TV host would “regularly” subject him to mean and biting insults about his weight, intelligence, clothes, and appearance. That’s right… a 20-year-old allegedly making fun of an 11-year-old. Oooooh, boy.

Speaking to the outlet, Gravolet said (below):

“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. She would criticize my weight. I would try to do homework in the office, she’d call me stupid, she’d call me fat. She would criticize my clothes. I was just a boy and this was a grown woman who took pleasure in seeing me become visibly upset. I don’t think there’s any excuse for it. I was a defenseless kid. What could I have told her back? It has an effect if somebody in a superior position to you, who’s much older, goes, ‘you’re fat. You might want to lose some of that weight chunky boy.’ I was always self conscious about my weight and it made things worse.”

Wow…

It’s one thing for kids to bully each other (and that s**t is bad enough on its own!!!), but to have an actual adult allegedly call out a child’s weight in that way? WTF?! Like, seriously, what the f**k???

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Unfortunately, Ben’s torment didn’t end there. The now-52-year-old also described one particular moment in the late 1970s when he was drawing a picture and Ellen came up behind him to see it.

Calling the now-multi-millionaire comedian “just the meanest, nastiest, most horrible person,” he alleged:

“One incident stands out in my mind. 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.’ And 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?”

The outlet also interviewed Gravolet’s now-retired mother, Tana Robinson, who was “furious” at her one-time recruiting agency employee DeGeneres upon finding out about the bullying aspect of the story a few weeks ago when he finally admitted it to her.

Even before that, though, she’d long regarded Ellen as “extremely rude” after employing her in the late ’70s.

Robinson, now 72, said:

“I think I probably fired her. Had I known that [the bullying] was going on, I’d have punched her and then fired her. A horrible person does that to an 11-year-old boy. I can’t even put myself in the shoes of someone at that age that dislikes children so much or whose ego is so low that she has to smash a child to feel good about herself. A bully is a good word for it. She never tried to bully me because she knew she couldn’t. So she bullied him with me not knowing about it.”

Now, as the A-lister’s entertainment industry world crashes around her Gravolet admits he does feel a little “vindicated” about finally seeing karma take its course. The marketing agency exec said:

“I don’t take pleasure in seeing this happen to her now but at least it makes me feel like I wasn’t the problem and I feel vindicated. If she did that to me 40 years ago, leopards don’t change their spots. I feel for her as a person with all this going on. But at some point you’ve gotta stop. You’ve got to go get enough help to find out why you take pleasure in someone else’s pain.”

Wow! What a biting, direct quote to wrap things up… What do U think of these bullying allegations, Perezcious readers? They are old (four decades old!) and obviously unproven accusations, but man… just more bad press for Ellen at a time when she probably really wants to stay out of the headlines following a miserable summer! Do U think people can change?? Sound off with your take on everything here down in the comments (below)!!!

[Image via WENN/DailyMailTV]