The Cotswolds, England
 — 

Time does not move quickly here. Union Jacks flap gently in the breeze; a golden slither of evening sun drapes a row of cottages; a red postbox, still bearing the initials of the late Queen, stands outside a village church, bathed in the fading light.

When you think of the English countryside, this is where you think of. This idyllic pocket of rolling hills and picturesque villages, two hours west of London, has been an affluent outpost for retired prime ministers and old-money elites for centuries.

But there’s a new crowd now. They’re called, with mild derision, the “Chippie set” – a posse of well-known figures who live around the affluent village of Chipping Norton, and are rarely seen by neighbors except when in transit between a growing number of top-end resorts and restaurants.

“They only go there – they really don’t come out,” Simon Finch, who runs a pub in Bloxham, told CNN on a recent warm afternoon.

“They leave their chauffeurs hanging around while they eat, (in) cars that are twelve feet long,” Liz, another local who declined to give her last name, complained. “You begin to feel (the area) doesn’t belong to you anymore.”

And the Chippie set has a notable new member. On a vast country estate behind an imposing timber gate, Ellen DeGeneres is settling into a new phase of her life – and mulling her next move.

After welcoming A-Listers to her TV studio set in Burbank, California, for two decades, DeGeneres now raises chickens, battles her riding mower and ushers wandering sheep from her open-plan living room. She’s been spotted taking walks and having a drink in her local pub, The Duck on the Pond.

But while Finch and DeGeneres are neighbors near the village of South Newington, they live in different worlds. DeGeneres’ spectacular fall from grace in 2020, amid reports of a toxic workplace at her show, made her the signature scalp of a pandemic-era eruption in cancel culture. For decades, the American public had been on first-name terms with Ellen; now she lives in splendid isolation in this charming nook of the English countryside, having told an audience last year she was “kicked out of show business.”

The “Be kind to one another” lady, whose coming out in the 1990s was a milestone for the visibility of LGBTQ+ people, is a Rorschach test for many Americans.

To DeGeneres’ supporters, she’s a pioneer who fell victim to a bloodthirsty online horde, taking the fall for a ruthless culture that is commonplace in the television industry and had little to do with her personally. To her critics, she epitomizes the dangerous imbalance of power in Hollywood and the inauthenticity of celebrity personas: a television star who built her brand on everything she was not and duped the viewing public in the process.

Now, five years after the collapse of her public image, it might be time to revisit DeGeneres’ case. Was her cancellation a product of a fleeting era when people spoke earnestly about “safe spaces” and “microaggressions” – a time when the left, not the right, was doing the canceling?

The zeitgeist remains an unforgiving place for hypocritical celebrities, but it’s difficult to imagine someone getting canceled for being a tough boss in 2025. Lizzo, Jimmy Fallon and Kelly Clarkson, who faced similar accusations that their tours and shows were toxic environments, have weathered the fallout. Lizzo denied those claims, while Fallon and Clarkson apologized to staff, and their shows remain on the air.

Were we all too hard on Ellen? Those who have worked with the star over the past several decades fall on radically different sides of that question. DeGeneres declined to be interviewed for this story, but several of her ex-colleagues spoke to CNN. Few have no opinion of her anymore; stances have hardened in hindsight.

“After 19 seasons, more than 3200 shows, and over 1000 employees, it is not unreasonable to expect that a small handful of people may have had a negative experience while working there,” a source close to DeGeneres and her talk show told CNN. “That is just common sense.”

“People are terrified to speak up to or disagree with the star of the show,” said Gil Junger, who directed dozens of episodes of DeGeneres’ 1990s sitcom “Ellen,” including the seminal edition in which her character came out as gay.

“She’s the most skilled comedic actress I’ve ever worked with,” Junger told CNN about DeGeneres. “But she is tough. She demands excellence from everyone around her.”

Junger said the controversy that hastened the demise of DeGeneres’ long-running talk show was unsurprising in a culture where “people all of a sudden realize you can’t do whatever the f**k you want to do just because you’re the boss.”

But, he added: “Maybe the pendulum has swung a little too far.”

It’s sunny, but this isn’t Los Angeles: Sunshine means little around here. Rain is coming, penciled in for an hour or two from now, and a harsh British wind is flinging leaves off branches and cloaking the countryside with something that smells dungy and damp.

These are the afternoons that Finch has to contend with. He’s having a cigarette outside his pub: the proper, old fashioned kind of British establishment threatened with extinction.

“There’s probably twice as many people here as there were in the ‘80s,” he says, gesturing down a beautiful high street. But none of them are inside his pub; they’ve opted instead for an expensive gastropub down the street, where DeGeneres and her wife, actor Portia de Rossi, were recently seen with singer Robbie Williams. An increasing number of American figures – from Kourtney Kardashian to Vice President JD Vance – chose the Cotswolds for vacations this summer.

At 67, DeGeneres has enjoyed adapting to a slower pace of life, but she isn’t retired, the source close to her told CNN. A year after a Netflix comedy special that was billed as the last word on her topsy-turvy career, she’s taking meetings with writers and producers, the source said, and keeping her options open. Earlier this month, DeGeneres announced a series of “In Conversation” events in five British cities – a mini-tour that could serve as a dry run for a TV comeback.

“Everything here is just better,” DeGeneres told a crowd at a public event in nearby Cheltenham this summer. “The way animals are treated. People are polite. I just love it here.”

Her old and new surroundings make for a jarring split-screen. On the same day that DeGeneres interviewed Anne Hathaway in 2019, for example, her future parish councilors in South Newington gathered to discuss whether putting the village Christmas tree in a tub would make it look taller. As she chatted up Ted Danson on one of her final episodes in 2022, councilors discussed “a significant amount of mud” that had built up near the woods.

The couple’s decision to relocate was cemented after Donald Trump won re-election in 2024, DeGeneres said. She interviewed Trump, then the host of “The Apprentice,” on her show in 2004 but has supported Democratic candidates in several elections since.

“We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis,” DeGeneres said. “And we’re like: ‘We’re staying here.’”

Instagram photos and videos give her fans a glimpse into her new life. She bumped into members of a Formula 1 team while in the popular Falkland Arms pub. De Rossi, she wrote last month, is “living her dream riding her horse through the English countryside and into the village.”

Already, the pair have moved to a second English home, relocating from a traditional Cotswolds house to a striking minimalist mansion. The 100-acre property boasts a pool, two lakes, a wildflower meadow and a modern, glassy farmhouse with floor-to-ceiling views of the surrounding fields.

Their new house – a hulking slab of timber, concrete and glass seemingly dropped from another world – hasn’t gone unnoticed. “It’s not very Cotswolds,” Liz told CNN in Charlbury. “It actually looks like it landed from Mars. Or from LA.” Other locals described the house as “horrific,” a “monstrosity,” and something akin to a “Bond villain’s lair.”

And almost a year after resettling here, DeGeneres herself is still the source of gossip. Though she’s never carried the same cultural importance in the UK, she’s a recognizable figure here. Talk of her arrival “has been everywhere,” 23-year-old local Eden Crystal, who used to watch DeGeneres’ talk show on her phone, told CNN. “When you think of really famous Americans, you think of Ellen DeGeneres.”

DeGeneres always wanted it to be that way. “I wanted to have money, I wanted to be special, I wanted people to like me, I wanted to be famous,” she told W Magazine in 2007.

As a child, the path to fame felt remote. The future television personality was born in Metairie, Louisiana, in a Christian Science household, to a father who “was scared of everything,” she told Michelle Obama in a podcast interview in 2023. “I didn’t want to become that person.”

DeGeneres told David Letterman in 2018 that she had been sexually assaulted by her mother’s then-husband, who is now dead, when she was 15 or 16. At the age of 20, her girlfriend was killed in a car accident, she told Dax Shepard on his podcast the same year.

But DeGeneres found an escape: comedy. On the Los Angeles circuit, and then on television, including a career-making appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” she showed the first glimpses of an easy charm that would ultimately earn her a sitcom. That show, “These Friends of Mine,” was quickly renamed “Ellen” after she emerged as its central draw.

“She could literally turn just about anything into comedic brilliance,” said Junger, one of the show’s directors.

“I used to hang out during those days with Robin Williams, and there was a familiarity between their minds,” he said. “Her ability to just improvise on the spot and make up really funny stuff was extraordinary to watch.”

But DeGeneres was single-minded about her career trajectory – and there was a sharp edge to her rise, according to some who worked on the series.

“She can be pretty brutal,” Junger told CNN. “She would fire people fairly often, actors on the show – if they weren’t cutting it, if they weren’t great, ‘Boom, get rid of them,’” he recalled. “She was also tough on the scripts – if the script wasn’t right, she’d say no, and they’d have to rewrite the whole script.”

“She was demanding, but she delivered,” he added.

For others who worked on the show, the experience became unbearable.

“It was not fun to work with her,” Holly Fulger, a member of the show’s original cast, told CNN. “I’ve worked with some really famous stars, and, but nobody was ever like that,” she said. “It was an incredibly difficult time for me, being on that show – it kind of made me want to quit acting.”

Fulger felt the focus of the show shifting from an ensemble towards its breakout star. She told CNN she was told by producers to dye her hair after DeGeneres remarked to her that she’d been mistaken for Fulger at an airport. She said jokes that got big laughs at the table read were cut if they didn’t highlight DeGeneres. At one point, Fulger says, DeGeneres asked the cast to tell Disney, which owned the show, that they were unhappy with the scripts.

“It was like watching an ego,” Fulger said. “Ellen wanted her own show, she wanted to be featured in every episode.” A representative for DeGeneres declined to comment when contacted by CNN.

DeGeneres’ career climb rankled Fulger, who was let go from the series, along with co-star Maggie Wheeler, when it was retooled after its first year on the air. Fulger now runs a non-profit in Cleveland.

“It just rocks your world. You grow up and you think: People are good … how can someone that awful be that famous for how nice she is?”

But when describing DeGeneres’ “pure, straight-up ambition,” Fulger added: “When you think about it, is that bad? That’s how she got to be so famous, and in a world like Hollywood, I think you need to be that way.”

DeGeneres’ fame soared, but a collision was coming. The cultural landscape of the 1990s had few prominent LGBTQ+ figures, and the sitcom star was keeping a part of herself hidden from public view.

That changed with a historic Time magazine profile in 1997, the cover of which featured a smiling DeGeneres and the headline: “Yep, I’m Gay.”

The ensuing episode of her ABC show – on which her character also comes out – was a monumental one. “I knew that it was an incredibly big deal while we were doing it,” said Junger.

It won plenty of praise. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) said at the time that DeGeneres had “made a profound and remarkable impact on our society.”

“What an incredible burden it was to bear,” President Barack Obama said nearly two decades later as he awarded DeGeneres the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “To risk your career like that. People don’t do that often.”

But much of America’s socially conservative wing was not ready.

Junger said people left threatening messages on the door of DeGeneres’ home at night, reading: “‘You better never get near my daughters. You’re disgusting.”

“I have no idea how they got my number, but a few people called me and screamed at me that I was going to hell,” he added.

And once the initial praise for the episode had worn off, so too did the industry’s appetite for an openly gay female star. “The complaint from ABC was ‘it was too gay,’” Junger recalled. “Too many gay storylines.”

The network never cited the character’s coming out as the reason for the show’s cancellation, but its chairman Stuart Bloomberg said at the time, according to The Guardian, that “as the show became more politicized and issue-oriented, it became less funny.” CNN reached out to ABC for comment.

“It hurt my feelings – I was getting jokes made at my expense on every late-night show,” DeGeneres told Shepard in her 2018 podcast appearance. “I was really depressed.”

The network placed a “parental discretion” advisory before subsequent episodes aired, and Ellen’s first landmark show, a troubled but historic project, was cancelled the next year.

For a few years, it seemed DeGeneres would become a culturally significant footnote in entertainment history. Her second attempt at a sitcom, “The Ellen Show,” was short-lived, airing just 13 episodes before being cancelled in 2002.

But DeGeneres never stopped searching for her next project.

“As we were closing up the offices, I submitted some material I had written to Ellen,” said Jeff Bye, a former comedy writer.

He said he had crossed paths with the actress nine years earlier outside a store in Laurel Canyon, pitched her some material, and was kept in DeGeneres’ orbit ever since. Days later, DeGeneres left a message on his answering machine: His material was good. She wanted to use some of it in her next book and pay for him for it. And she was preparing to host a daytime talk show. Would he want to join the writing staff?

The ensuing talk show – “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” – premiered in 2003. It was the third flagship television project to bear Ellen’s name, and the one that stuck. For two decades it became daytime comfort viewing for tens of millions of Americans. Famous faces would dance their way toward the seat next to DeGeneres or play pranks on the Warner Bros. lot to raucous studio applause.

But Bye ultimately felt let down – he was never offered a job on the show. “When I finally got Ellen on the phone, she explained those decisions were up to the producers and not her,” he said. “I was thinking: “Well the name of the show is ‘Ellen’. So one would think she could override that.”

The rise of social media would eventually help facilitate DeGeneres’ downfall. But initially it gave the show another, direct avenue into households, and made-for-YouTube moments became its calling card.

“The first five years, she was extremely hands-on,” a longtime senior member of the show’s crew told CNN. But once the show found its rhythm, DeGeneres stepped back, the person said, throwing her time to other projects. She twice hosted the Oscars, most memorably in 2014 when a selfie she took alongside Brad Pitt, Bradley Cooper, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lawrence and other stars was retweeted more than 2 million times and became a cultural time capsule.

Stepping back from a demanding job, however, was a luxury her show’s staff said they didn’t have.

“I was drinking the Kool-Aid a little bit more back then: I couldn’t admit it was toxic,” an employee who continued to work with DeGeneres on subsequent projects told CNN. “Now I can look back and say, yes, (it was) probably a little toxic.”

Staffers were told their doctor appointments must be pushed to days when the show wasn’t airing, and laptops were delivered to their homes if people were too sick to come in, the employee said. Such mandates were set by producers and managers, and it was unlikely DeGeneres knew about them, the employee added.

A representative for DeGeneres declined to comment. A statement from WarnerMedia, released at the time, stated that Warner Bros took the “allegations around the show’s workplace culture very seriously.” They said they made changes to ensure “a workplace based on respect and inclusion.”

“By the end of the show she was incredibly wealthy,” the former senior member of her crew told CNN. “And I think it’s hard to find people you trust and people who would give you good advice.”

Perhaps this is why Ellen said she never knew what was happening behind the scenes of a show that bore her face and name, and why many believe she never fully took ownership for the scandal.

“You get in this bubble, where people don’t necessarily tell you what you need to hear,” the crew member said. “I wish someone had been able to tell her what she needed to hear,” they added. “But I don’t think that person exists.”

Three of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show”’s top producers “parted ways” with the show in August 2020 after the unflattering media reports and an internal investigation by Warner Bros. Television. (CNN and Warner Bros. Television are owned by the same parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.)

The saga made DeGeneres one of the first victims of public scorn during the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. Celebrities aren’t known for eating their own, and some rushed to her defense, while others kept silent.

But those who watched DeGeneres’ rise were stunned by the speed of her fall. “It was so strong and swift,” Junger said of the backlash that derailed her career at the same moment a pandemic had stopped the world. It was “horrible timing,” he said, and a “perfect storm” that delivered a public target for people’s frustrations when the gap between the wealthy and everyone else seemed especially stark.

Or perhaps, it was justice: a rare case in which a power imbalance was flipped on its architect.

“It did expose toxic workplaces,” her former co-star Fulger told CNN. “When you get somebody that famous, with that kind of ego, there’s this tendency to protect that person.” People were “scared” to challenge her, Fulger suggested — until suddenly they weren’t.

Five years ago, as outrage painted every controversy in stark black-and-white, a headline dubbed DeGeneres “one of the biggest villains of 2020.” But maybe the truth was more nuanced. Maybe she was a villain and a hero – a perpetrator and a victim – all at once.

Years later, many of the show’s staff remain fiercely defensive of DeGeneres, describing her as driven and challenging but fair. The workplace environment on her show became breakneck and pressurized in her name, but not at her direction, they said.

“I feel bad because at the end of the day, she’s a human and I genuinely think she wanted to do good in this world,” said the former employee who described the show’s working environment as toxic. “The world is so cruel.”

“But she’s crying in a mansion,” they added.

DeGeneres apologized on air, and to staff during a Zoom call. A source said at the time that DeGeneres told workers: “I’m hearing that some people felt that I wasn’t kind or too short with them, or too impatient. I apologize to anybody if I’ve hurt your feelings in any way.”

The show eventually wound down by 2022.

Or, as DeGeneres put it, without irony, in her 2024 Netflix comedy special: “I got kicked out of showbusiness.”

Former colleagues who spoke to CNN said they believed DeGeneres when she said she was shocked, along with the rest of the country, to learn of the atmosphere on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” DeGeneres apologized on-air in September 2020 for the scandal, telling viewers: “I know that I’m in a position of privilege and power, and I realize that with that comes responsibility. And I take responsibility for what happens at my show.”

But her subsequent remarks struck a different tone. “It looked like I was the boss. The show was called ‘Ellen,’ and everybody was wearing T-shirts that said ‘Ellen,’ and there were buildings all over the Warner Brothers lot that said ‘Ellen.’ But I don’t think that meant that I should be in charge,” DeGeneres said in her 2024 stand-up special. “I don’t think that Ronald McDonald’s the CEO of McDonald’s.”

“I think that it was probably a missed opportunity (for her) to not take ownership and apologize,” the former senior member of her crew told CNN. “I always hoped that there would be a bigger apology. As we got to Netflix comedy special number two, and it was just more of the same lack of awareness and ownership … I found that part disappointing.”

DeGeneres had started telling audiences to “be kind to one another” after the 2010 death by suicide of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers student who had been outed as gay. But a decade later, when scandal struck, it had become an impossible standard against which she was judged.

“Here’s the downside,” she joked in a 2018 stand-up special, during which she appeared to be grappling with the paradox in which she’d trapped herself: “I can never do anything unkind, ever, now. Ever.”

And when the court of online opinion became its most powerful, DeGeneres was given the harshest sentence possible: she was cancelled, at least in the eyes of many of her longtime viewers, unable to shake the charge that her cheerful persona was a facade. “You can’t be mean and be in show business,” she joked in her Netflix special last year.

The verdict stung for someone who has long admitted that she wanted to be liked. “I’ve spent an entire lifetime trying to make people happy, and I’ve cared far too much what other people think of me,” DeGeneres said.

Her life is very different now. Instead of applause, her afternoons are soundtracked by tractors and sheep and Britain’s famously fickle weather. The clock in the nearby village has broken several times in recent years, each time taking weeks to repair. After the breakneck pace of hosting a daily talk show, time may already be ticking too slowly for DeGeneres as well.

“I want to do something,” DeGeneres told an audience at her July event, as she ponders a re-entry to public life. “I do like my chickens, but I’m a little bit bored.”

In any case, the winds outside DeGeneres’ imposing mansion might be shifting. The zeitgeist is cyclical, and an aging whiff of toxicity may not be enough to sentence a celebrity to cancellation in 2025. A successful return for DeGeneres could prove a point about the whimpering demise of cancel culture and redefine a complicated legacy for one of American television’s most prominent and divisive figures.

But ultimately, the verdict on her career won’t be hers to write.

“Being in this business, I’ve had to care what people think,” she said during her special. “It’s our only real currency for success. If they like you, you’re in. And if they don’t, you’re out … When you’re a public figure, you’re open to everyone’s interpretation.”