It’s a familiar scenario: A person is accused of doing a bad thing (or many bad things), and then their friends butt in and say, “WELL they’ve never done the bad thing to me SO…,” followed by a shrugging gesture to indicate they’ve made an unassailable point. The faulty logic being that the accused has always been nice and good to their friends, hence they could not possibly be monstrous to/around someone else. We’ve reached this very phase in the ongoing controversy surrounding Ellen DeGeneres and her long-running daytime talk show, which was the subject of two recent BuzzFeed News reports in which numerous former employees described a toxic workplace environment created by senior staff members and detailed allegations of sexual misconduct among producers. Although DeGeneres herself was not directly accused of improper or abusive conduct, it’s been something of an open secret among those in the industry—particularly comedians—that the TV host is nothing like her “nice” persona. But a handful of DeGeneres’ famous friends are coming to her defense, and oh, look, even Diane Keaton is here!
Keaton, who’s something of a pro when it comes to backing problematic friends, voiced her support in an Instagram post that definitely doesn’t look like it was written at gunpoint:
In another Instagram post, Kevin Hart—no stranger to controversy himself—said DeGeneres is “one of the dopest people on the fucking planet”: