'Rick & Morty' Cuts Ties With Justin Roiland, The Voice Behind Both Rick And Morty, Following Multiple Accusations
Justin Roiland is the co-creator, executive producer, and voice actor for both mad scientist Rick and his grandson Morty on the wildly popular Cartoon Network show Rick & Morty.
Er, he was until this week.
First came the news about domestic battery/false imprisonment charges:
On Jan. 12, NBC News was the first to break the news that Roiland was charged with one count of domestic battery with corporal injury and one count of false imprisonment by menace, violence, fraud or deceit in Orange County based on an alleged 2020 incident with an unnamed Jane Doe that Roiland was dating.
And then six days ago on Reddit's r/popculturechat page someone posted a compilation of evidence that alleges Roiland is a serial predator with a particular interest in teen girls. Basically, the Chris D'Elia of the cartoon world.
By Saturday the whole thread made its way to r/adultswim and it began picking up steam on other social media sites.
And yesterday evening the official Rick & Morty account announced the show has ended its relationship with him, though it wasn't made clear if it was due to the battery charge or grooming/other allegations or both.
Obviously it's the right move to cut ties, but looking through the screenshot receipts and hearing podcast clips where he essentially laments not being allowed to hook up with children once they've gone through puberty, I gotta put out a 'lil speculation that his associates had to have been aware, or that at the very least their 'creeper senses' were tingling like crazy, and they shoulda moved away from him sooner. Especially since women have been stepping forward from all the way back in Roiland's Gravity Falls days which was over a decade ago. If you do some quick searches around social media it's easy to see stories & warnings have been shared for years. Like so many of these high profile cases it appears to have been an open secret.
A few of many examples making the rounds..
Flirting with a 16 year old:
Inviting a 17 year old to his hotel room:
You can click the links yourself but I left out the worst of them, & there's examples where it appears contact had gone beyond just DMs. In other exchanges he texts in teen girl lingo so he can be 'on their level', classic predator behavior. Barf.
Here's some of those old podcast clip examples:
A hundred years ago, there was little 13 year old girls built like a woman - they were gettin married and having kids. And now we're gonna be all precious about it? I'm not a pedophile though, I do follow the law, I wait until they're 18.
If I could go back and be a 4th grade kid right now with what I know, God I'd be walking around - I'd be getting laid every fucking day. And it would be legal, too, because I would be a kid. I'm not a pedophile though!
I'm not attracted to little kid bodies, I'm attracted to women bodies. And look a fuckin 14 year old that looks like she's 18 with big titties, of course I'm attracted to that.
This whole Chris Hansen thing? I'm like "fuck you, man," these girls are like fully developed and talkin online like, "I want you to f*** me,".. They would email photos of what they look like and the ones I saw I was like, "This girl is fully fucking developed!"
I mean, Roiland didn't even try to hide it, and it's easy for him to say these things because he can play them off as a joke. (If at any point you found yourself thinking, "He's got a point," please throw yourself into the sea).
As for Dan Harmon, the other co-creator of Rick & Morty, he was called out for sexual harassment in 2018 by Megan Ganz, a writer on his show Community. In Harmon's case he addressed it directly on his podcast, Harmontown.
While serving as Community’s showrunner, he had a yearslong crush on Ganz and behaved in a “flirty, creepy” manner. When she did not reciprocate, he retaliated. “I drank. I took pills. I crushed on her and resented her for not reciprocating it,” he explained. “And the entire time I was the one writing her paychecks and in control of whether she stayed or went and whether she felt good about herself or not, and said horrible things.”
According to Vox, "Ganz, for her part, called it “a master class in how to apologize,” and decided to publicly forgive him."
As for the future of Rick & Morty, the seventh season was ordered by Cartoon Network as part of a long-term deal for 70 new episodes and it's still slated to come out later this year, though I'm not sure how Rick & Morty will go without… Rick & Morty. I feel sad for any young girl who loved the show who he tried to (or did) take advantage of, and for everyone working on that program who didn't know & is stuck in that shadow. Quite the pickle, Rick.