Greyson Chance Reveals How Ellen ‘Completely Abandoned’ Him After Discovery

Greyson Chance, whose new album Palladium just came out, reveals the truth about how he feels about Ellen DeGeneres in an interview in Rolling Stone 13 years after he appeared on her show in a performance that went viral: “I never met someone more manipulative, more self-centered, and more blatantly opportunistic.”

 

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DeGeneres, through a representative, declined to comment for the Rolling Stone interview.

Chance underscored the sentiment in a video he posted on TikTok on Friday (below).

Chance, who’s now 25, was just 12 when he became the buzz of the internet, playing the piano and singing Lady Gaga’s hit song “Paparazzi.”

A week after the clip from the show became an internet phenomena, DeGeneres called and he took his first plane ride from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, Calif. where he said that DeGeneres assured him and his mother, Lisa, that they were “going to do this together.”

The A-list star, who was making a foray into the music business, hooked Chance up with an entire team of people and, most importantly, signed him to her new music label, which was distributed by Interscope Geffen A&M Records.

But Chance tells Rolling Stone that DeGeneres “became domineering and way too controlling.” For example, she stipulated what he wore, and what he didn’t; no leather, since she’s a vegan. “She would come in and look at a rack, yell at stylists, berate people in front of me and say, ‘This is what you’re wearing on the show,'” Chance said. “She was just degrading to people.”

 

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Chance and his mom both said that she scolded the two of them over the phone for not watching the Justin Bieber documentary that she had asked him to see. Chance hadn’t watched it because he was tired from touring. Many of Chance’s words echo what employees of DeGeneres’s former talk show alleged in a July 2020 report from BuzzFeed. They called Ellen a toxic workplace, where fear and intimidation were the norm. DeGeneres apologized on the show afterward.

 

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“I learned that things happened here that never should have happened. I take that very seriously and I want to say I am so sorry for the people who were affected,” she said. “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.”

Back in 2012, when Ellen was still on the air, Chance’s second album bombed and ticket sales declined. He was dropped by the record label and by his team. Chance says that DeGeneres “completely abandoned” him and wouldn’t even return his calls.

 

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Chance:

“I couldn’t get ahold of her. Couldn’t talk to her. Whenever I would come on the show, it was such a fake smile. She wouldn’t even ask, ‘How are you doing? How are you holding up?’ It was just like, ‘Here’s what we’re going to talk about. We’ll see you on there.'”

Someone on her show contacted him at some point, because he appeared on it after he left the label. In all, he was on DeGeneres’s stage 10 times over the years, twice after 2012, according to IMDb. When he performed there in 2015, he said the two didn’t speak at all backstage. Still, he went back in 2019 to promote a new album, Portraits. A show source pointed out that Chance hadn’t made any complaints at the time. He said he was unhappy, though, especially on that final visit.

“She came out during soundcheck and she looked at me, hugged me. And she said, ‘How have you been?’ And that just killed me inside, because I was like, ‘What do you mean how have I f***ing been? Where have you been?”