But of course it didn’t require a Buzzfeed exposé to make it clear DeGeneres had a complicated relationship with niceness. Her dark side had bubbled up during an excruciatingly passive-aggressive exchange with Dakota Johnson in which DeGeneres, grinning like a shark, accused Johnson of not inviting her to a birthday party (the talk show host had been invited and didn’t actually want to go anyway).

DeGeneres had also taken flak over attending an American football match in the company of George W Bush — for which she was upbraided on social media as a traitor to the entertainment industry. And when comedian Kevin Porter had asked Twitter to chime in on all the times DeGeneres had been “mean”, his inbox overflowed.

“Right now we all need a little kindness,” he wrote. “You know, like Ellen DeGeneres always talks about! She is also notoriously one of the meanest people alive.” More than 2,000 people chimed in.

The lesson that DeGeneres has been taught is that modern celebrity demands more than a virtuous image. You are required to fully inhabit your wholesomeness. It’s not enough to have a better angel perched on one shoulder. You must be that better angel. Which means that the sort of dirty little secrets it was possible to get away with when DeGeneres first went on the air in 2003 — a short temper, the blind eye shown to power-crazed line managers — are no longer tolerated.

The irony of course is that even as celebs are expected to set a perfect example, for the rest of us, bullying has never been more acceptable — or easily to indulge in. The outpouring of vitriol against DeGeneres when the Buzzfeed story broke was, for instance, incredible — and will have surely shocked her. It was a Krakatoa of schadenfreude, its ash cloud turning social media grey.

She isn’t the only celeb to have suffered in this way .“Imagine all the insecurities that you already feel about yourself and having someone write a paragraph pointing out every little thing, even if it’s just physical," Selena Gomez said in 2017, when explaining why she became disillusioned with Instagram. And then there is former Little Mix singer Jesy Nelson, who quit the group last year, having previously said that “online trolls” made her “want to die”.

The abuse started when Little Mix won The X Factor in 2011, Nelson said. “I had about 101 Facebook messages in my inbox, and the first one that came up was from some random man, saying: ‘You are the ugliest thing I’ve seen in my life, you do not deserve to be in this girl band. You deserve to die’.”

None of this is to excuse toxicity behind the scenes at DeGeneres’ show — or to let the presenter off the hook for that weirdly confrontational interaction with Dakota Johnson. It is merely to point out that celebrity has changed. There was a time — and it isn’t all that long ago — when A-listers were able to present to the world a highly-edited version of themselves. And when they could escape public censure. How, after all, could the public possibly get to them?

Ugly behaviour, out of control ego, tantrums — does anyone believe these weren’t part of what went on on movie sets and in TV studios for decades? Until recently, a veil was drawn around it all. That time has now passed.

The irony for DeGeneres, of course, is that in the 1990s she was seen as contributing hugely towards fostering tolerance in the public sphere. In an age when homophobia was so widely accepted most people didn’t even notice it, she bravely exited the closet. As she will have known, this was at the price of her movie career — but she did so anyway.

“For a long time, there was a lot of fear that [my being gay] was going to influence people’s opinions about me and and so I didn’t ever have the confidence that I should have had,” DeGeneres said to USA Today in 2018.

“Whenever you carry shame around, you just can’t possibly be a confident person. It took a while to shake off that judgment and the attacks I felt… Depression eats away at your confidence and you get lost in that, and forget that you’re enough just as you are.”

Yet in fostering the image of someone who cared about the feelings of those around her, DeGeneres was ultimately hoisted on her own contradictions. The Ellen DeGeneres Show was sold to the world as bottled niceness.

And from the moment it became obvious the women on whom the brand was built was more complicated than that sweetness-and-light image, the game was up. The promise the series made was that, every time we tuned in, we would be in the company of someone who radiated niceness. DeGeneres couldn’t live up to that. And so she doomed herself.