Ellen DeGeneres Can't Stop Adding Fuel To The Phony Portia Marriage Chatter

Trouble in paradise? Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi's relationship is riddled with red flags; heck, even their zodiac signs don't match. It began with trouble, apparently, as the pair were in relationships with other people when they first fell in love with one another. "She had a girlfriend and I had a girlfriend, but it wasn't like, 'Oh, we're going to have an affair,'" DeGeneres told People in 2005. "We were just supposed to be together. It was a tough decision. I was physically getting sick because I was trying not to say anything. So I told Alex and she told Francesca. It was really hard to uproot everything." We hear you, Ellen, but just imagine being the ones who got uprooted.

Since then, however, it's been widely rumored that DeGeneres and de Rossi's relationship isn't always rosy. Years after a 2020 Buzzfeed News piece killed "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" with interviews that exposed the host's supposed toxic behavior, one staffer suggested that DeGeneres' marriage to Rossi was equally toxic behind closed doors. The anonymous cameraman told The Daily Mail that DeGeneres became very territorial of her wife "if male staffers from the show spoke to her while on set." 

The source added, "It would be a commercial break, and if [Ellen] didn't know you, she would ask about you. You just hoped and prayed you weren't seated by her wife, so you didn't get her attention." Unfortunately, DeGeneres herself has only ramped up the rumors surrounding her marriage, lending credence to the gossip. 

Fresh off the heels of Buzzfeed's claims in 2020 and the 2021 announcement that "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" would be ending, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi kept a united spousal front. Still, the cracks in their famous marriage began to spread. "She was watching it happen to me ... she went through it with me," DeGeneres confessed to an audience in April 2024 about the toll the scandal took on de Rossi, per People. However, one source told InTouch that the situation was actually much worse than DeGeneres let on, claiming that the marriage was "in terrible shape" and that it was "hell at home" in the aftermath of the Buzzfeed article, making their happy façade seem totally phony.

Things seemingly worsened when the couple permanently relocate to the U.K. following the results of the 2024 election in America. "We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis, and I was like, 'He got in,'" DeGeneres told the BBC. "And we're like, 'We're staying here.'" Shortly after plunking down a staggering $20 million for a 43-acre estate in the Cotswolds, the couple reversed course and copped a second, bigger property that would better accommodate Rossi's horses, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Even that hasn't been enough for happiness, though. DeGeneres admitted to the BBC, "I do like my chickens, but I'm a little bit bored." As a philosopher once opined, pain and boredom are the enemies of happiness. Perhaps that's true of marriage, too.