“Everything we do, we offend somebody,” Heche said. “I don’t even know where you’re supposed to go to express yourself in a way that somebody isn’t going to use it against you.”
Heche was taken off life support on Sunday following a car crash into a Los Angeles home on August 5 that resulted in a fire. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles County Department of the Medical Examiner-Coroner ruled her death was an accident. The coroner’s report cited inhalation, thermal injuries and other “significant conditions” as the cause of death.
Ellis—the best-selling author of controversial bestsellers Less Than Zero and American Psycho—indicated on Twitter that his discussion with Heche took place on Election Day in 2016 and was released weeks later. In his re-post of the episode on his Patreon page, Ellis wrote that Heche was “an absolute delight to spend time with before, during and after we taped her episode.”
During their discussion, Ellis brought up what he called “our everyone-is-a-victim culture,” where he said people are “wanting equality and yet demanding overt protection.”
“How do you respond to this notion of what seems to be a kind of hypocrisy going on the culture—total equality yet total protection from any kind of adversity? Is that equality, is this freedom?” Ellis asked.
“I think I’ve had a lot of the same questions too. Who isn’t a victim right now?” Heche said. “I mean, really, who isn’t put upon? It’s unbelievable to me.”
Ellis then asked Heche if such things upset her.
Heche said it does bother her, because it makes her wonder, “Wait, what are we allowed to do?”
She added, “Why has our culture evolved into everywhere we go, we’re stepping on eggshells?”
“You look at the eyes of other people, and they’re doing the same. They’re doing it. You’re like, ‘Oh my God,’” she said. “No wonder people are looking at their phones all the time, because they cannot deal with the fact that they can’t be a human being.”
Ellis said an issue in society today is “being punished for expressing yourself” and “losing jobs for expressing yourself,” which led Heche to return to an earlier point she had made about nearly being fired from a movie when she first went public with dating Ellen DeGeneres. (She credited Harrison Ford for sticking up for her to stay on that movie, Six Days Seven Nights, which went on to box office success.)
“Why is it impossible for us to be able to say who we love and then have our jobs?” she said. “Why is progress going backwards? What are we doing to each other?”
Newsweek reached out to Ellis for comment.
