Do we like Bret Easton Ellis?
Our score: 3 out of 10. The record shows jibes about HIV and feminists, a defence of Ye and brushing off accusers, with little real good found to set against it.
Ellis was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the San Fernando Valley. His father was a successful property developer. He published Less Than Zero in 1985 while still a student at Bennington College, aged 21. American Psycho followed in 1991, and the outrage over it became part of his legend. Since 2013 he has also run a podcast, and in 2019 he put out the essay collection White.
The gay-community stoush is the one that sticks. In 2013 he was not welcomed at GLAAD's media awards after tweets, including one comparing watching Glee to “stepping in a puddle of HIV”. GLAAD called it a publicity stunt, and the Advocate reported he did not respond to its request to meet. Years earlier he had also reportedly told bullied kids to deal with it, which tells you where his instincts sit.
On women, in 2016 he called feminists who object to being objectified “so deluded they border on insanity”. In 2019 he told the Irish Times he was “haunted” by how musician Ryan Adams was treated after The New York Times reported misconduct accusations against Adams, and said Joe Biden shouldn't be under #MeToo either. The Drift says he has also dismissed other accusations, including Anthony Rapp's against Kevin Spacey.
The harm check is a mixed bag. He's a reactionary-leaning culture warrior, according to The Drift, who has appeared with Tucker Carlson and mocked “the resistance”. City AM reported in 2023 that he defended Ye over comments the paper called antisemitic, and audience members walked out of a book signing. He praised Elon Musk and Morrissey in the same piece. On Trump he has said “you cannot take Trump literally”, and Hot Press called him “emphatically not a Trump supporter”, which is the writer's description, not his. Nothing turned up on what he's said about trans people, vaccines or climate, so we can't score what we can't find.
The recent stuff is more of the same. In October 2025 he told his podcast that One Battle After Another was “not a very good movie” and would be a “musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era”. In February 2026 he said major stars had turned down the American Psycho remake. Where you land depends on whether you read him as a sharp contrarian or a man who can't stop poking the left.
The good side is thin in the record we checked. His books are widely read, and The Drift calls The Shards an unusually sincere gay love story, which is more heart than his tweets suggested. FX greenlit a series of it in 2025. We found no charity work, no mentoring and no costly stand for others, and that is honestly the whole list.