After an explosive argument between chef Ben Robinson and his galley assistant Elena “Ellie” Dubaich on Below Deck Down Under Season 4, Ellie storms out of the galley and insists on speaking to Captain Jason Chambers. But the conversation leaves Jason dumbfounded, as he explains during the above preview for Episode 9, airing Monday, March 30 at 8/7c.
“I’m shocked,” he tells producers. “I thought everything was fantastic down there. They were working well together last charter.”
As Ellie approaches Jason on the sun deck, she declares, “Captain, what just happened in the galley, it’s unacceptable… the way Ben speaks to me.”
“He needs me to do certain things for dinner, but he never told me about it. And then all the sudden, he was like, ‘Oh, you need to hurry up. Dinner is starting. You need to do all these things,’” she adds. “I would have prioritized my day better if you, as my manager, would have told me, ‘By the way, these are your tasks. I need them done by this time.’”
“I actually thought the communication was pretty good inside the galley,” Jason tells Ellie.
“[Ben] always calls me ‘honey,’ ‘baby,’ ‘sweetie pie,’ ‘sugar pie,’” Ellie tells Jason. “It’s humiliating to me. Why do you not address me by my name?”
Jason agrees, “He shouldn’t be calling you anything that you don’t want to be called. You’ve got boundaries, and you need to communicate with him.” Jason tells her he’ll speak to Ben as well, and assures her, “I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
While Jason thinks Ellie has some valid points, he takes issue with her timing in telling him about them. “I don’t want to dismiss her feelings and her situation; however, there’s a time for everything. Not ten minutes before dinner,” he tells producers. “So, I’m probably going to have to keep my head in the galley a little bit. Monitor this. Make sure the food goes out, and the tempers don’t go up.”
Ellie Dubaich and Ben Robinson’s galley tension, explained
The tension between Ben and Ellie had been growing steadily each charter. In Episode 7, Ben left Ellie to clean the galley on her own.
“The biggest issue for me was like, I felt like it was really insensitive on your part to just like up and leave, and just leave me on my own to clean. I really didn’t like that. Like that actually upset me,” Ellie explained to him during the episode. “We are one team.”
Another point of contention: Ben’s use of pet names. “It needs to stop. I can’t f—king take it,” she told producers in a confessional.
“Don’t call me honey. Don’t ever call me honey,” Ellie told Ben. “My name is Elena. My name is Elena or Ellie. I’m not honey. I’m not bunny. I’m not anything.”
RELATED: Captain Jason Has a Surprising Take on a Disagreement Between Chef Ben and the Charter Guests
Ellie reflected on the moment during the Below Deck Down Under After Show. “Ben at that point put me into full-on fight or flight,” she recalled. “I was not thinking rationally anymore…I was in the battlefield, I was fighting for freedom from pet names and projection.”
RELATED: Captain Jason Chambers Makes a Damning Declaration on Chef Ben and Ellie: “Unacceptable”
She also spoke with second officer João Franco it. “Having a boss call me all these pet names—not only is it unprofessional, you’re diminishing me into this small, nonserious entity,” Ellie explained. “I want to be shown respect. I want to be treated as much. That matters to me.”
Ben Robinson responds to criticism of his use of pet names
Ben defended his pet name usage to his friend and former Below Deck coworker Kate Chastain during the After Show. “Kate, you know this, old-school yachting, right? We used to do it a lot. There were pet names,” he explained. “I don’t know if you worked with Aussies and English—we did say, ‘Hey, love. Hey, babe.’”
Still, Ben admitted he did understand Ellie’s point of view. “She commands respect, and she wants respect, and if you have the chef addressing you as ‘love’ or pet names, or whatever, it’s not commanding of respect,” he conceded. “It’s belittlement from me, and that’s how she saw it, and I agree with her…She was due respect, and I think it was a fair point.”
Don’t miss Ben revealing how flirting with stew Jenna Woudberg is helping him get his “mojo” back.
