Paula Deen reveals embarrassing faux pas she made with vegan Ellen DeGeneres on her show

Paula Deen confessed to a gift-giving blunder she once made when she gave a present to Ellen DeGeneres.

The celebrity chef, 78, revealed the poorly chosen gift in her new documentary, Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, as she discussed appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

At the time, the former Food Network host — who recently discussed her N-word controversy in a tense interview — presented Ellen, who is a longtime vegan, with a ham. 

In a clip from the documentary, DeGeneres is seen introducing Deen as the ‘queen of Southern cooking,’ as the cookbook author walks out while carrying a ham. 

‘I brought a ham for my favorite ham,’ she told DeGeneres, who thanked her for the gift. ‘Isn’t that sweet?’

‘Listen, and he’s so heavy, he’s your pig to keep up with now!’ Deen added as she handed the ham to DeGeneres.

At the time, the former Food Network host presented Ellen, who is a longtime vegan, with a ham; They are seen in a still from The Ellen DeGeneres Show 

Deen recalled how DeGeneres ‘took it and laid it down, and didn’t say a word.’

‘Well, I found out later she was a vegetarian. She didn’t eat meat!’ Deen went on, adding, ‘I felt like a turd.’

In response to the documentary, a representative for DeGeneres told Entertainment Weekly that she is a vegan, not a vegetarian as Deen claimed. 

Ellen’s daytime talk-show came to an end in 2022 amid a blizzard of allegations that she presided over a ‘toxic’ work environment. 

Deen’s documentary, directed by Billy Corben, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. 

It follows her career from its humble beginnings as a $200 catering business she started in her kitchen.

It also covers her long, 11-year run on the Food Network, which ended in 2013 after she was fired for admitting under oath that she used a racial slur.

The deposition was part of a lawsuit filed by Lisa Jackson, a former manager at Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House, one of Deen’s restaurants. Jackson accused the manager — Deen’s brother, Bubba Hiers — of sexual harassment and using racially offensive language.

Although the lawsuit was later dismissed after a settlement, the controversy led to the end of many of Deen’s business deals and largely derailed her career.

Deen struck a defiant tone as she looked back on her N-word controversy in a recent interview.

Deen was joined by her sons and business partners Bobby and Jamie Deen earlier this month for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, in which she claimed that she ‘lost it all’ as a result of a lawsuit deposition in which she admitted that she had used the N-word in the past.

‘I brought a ham for my favorite ham,’ she told DeGeneres. Deen recalled how the host ‘took it and laid it down, and didn’t say a word’

‘Well, I found out later she was a vegetarian. She didn’t eat meat!’ Deen went on, adding, ‘I felt like a turd’; Ellen seen in 2022 

The documentary, directed by Billy Corben, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. It covers her long, 11-year run on the Food Network, which ended in 2013 after she was fired for admitting under oath that she used a racial slur

Ellen’s daytime talk-show came to an end in 2022 amid a blizzard of allegations that she presided over a ‘toxic’ work environment

The contentious interview, in which she seemingly had tense interactions with her own sons, followed the premiere of her documentary.

During the conversation, Deen was quizzed on the lawsuit and her past use of the N-word.

In the interview, Deen’s son Bobby admitted that he was ‘excited for’ the documentary to be released, but he ‘thought it was a terrible idea from the beginning.’

‘It just felt like a lot of time had passed. I didn’t see the reason to go back and over it and rehash it,’ he explained. ‘Because we had survived it. As a family, we had survived it.’

He added that his mother’s detractors and fans had already made up their minds and likely wouldn’t be swayed by the film.

But Deen objected, saying that the fallout from the lawsuit ‘ate at my gut every day.’

‘I would have been fine had the whole story been told — had the real story been told,’ she claimed, before accusing Jackson of being ‘a known liar.’

‘They took her word and ran with it, and no one every investigated any further,’ Deen claimed. ‘I was not going to be happy until the world saw the truth.’

After Bobby reiterated that there was ‘a lot of risk’ to relitigating the case in the documentary, Deen claimed she had already ‘lost it all.’

‘I disagree with that,’ Bobby replied.

‘Mom, I’m sorry to correct you. We have not lost it all. By far,’ he continued in a shockingly unvarnished moment. ‘Our family is intact. We’re alive.’

‘This was 2013, a long time ago. And our beautiful business has thrived and survived this whole time,’ Bobby continued. ‘We have beautiful families. We have far from lost everything. Far from it.’

But Deen wouldn’t let up, and she recounted how, within ’24 hours,’ she had lost deals with the Food Network, Walmart and Target. ‘It was just everybody,’ she claimed.

Deen added that it was ‘heart-wrenching’ because ‘these people knew me.’

Deen went on to claim that she was forced into issuing an apology that she later regretted, though her other son Jamie clarified that ‘nobody made’ her apologize in that manner.

Deen recently struck a defiant tone as she looked back on her N-word controversy ; Seen September 8

Deen claimed in her lawsuit to have used the N-word multiple times as an adult, but in her interview she seemed to suggest that a conversation with her father as a teen got her to take it out of her vocabulary

She even claimed that she ‘didn’t know what [she] was supposed to be apologizing for.’

She offered up a fuzzy timeline, as she said the N-word had ‘been out of our vocabulary now for a long time,’ and added, ‘My daddy taught me when I was a teenager, he told me, “I don’t ever want to ever hear you being mean or rude to anyone.” That’s how I was raised.’

The anecdote seemed to suggest that Deen hadn’t used the N-word since her teen years, but in her deposition she admitted to using it as recently as the 1980s when she recounted to her husband how a Black man had allegedly robbed a bank that she worked at.

As for regrets, Deen didn’t say that she regretted having ever used the N-word multiple times.

Instead, she said she wished she had gotten an attorney who would have forcefully objected when she was asked about using the term during the deposition.

She also said she regretted not just settling the lawsuit from the start, instead of letting it get to the point of the disastrous deposition.