**Content warning: Descriptions of sexual assault, grooming**
Earlier this year, Justin Roiland was charged with domestic violence. Those charges were eventually dismissed due to “insufficient evidence” but now 11 more people have come forward and told NBC News of their troubling experiences with the Rick and Morty co-creator.
The outlet spoke with the women and non-binary alleged victims, publishing their quotes and screenshots of apparent conversations with Roiland. Their accounts span a period of nine years, from 2013 to 2022, with a number of the people saying Roiland made sexual advances toward them while they were underage.
They describe a pattern in which Roiland would follow and interact with fans of the show on social media, using those platforms to communicate with the young people, as well as Tinder, where he would compliment them and often allegedly turn the conversation sexual in nature, calling them things like “super cute’ and “hot” and ask them if they were “into girls.”
One woman, who was 20 at the time, matched with the then-39-year-old on Tinder. She told NBC she joked that he could take her shopping and that she would give him “a fashion show” before getting coffee. He said that he would be “down.” She says they also discussed that due to her age, she wouldn’t be able to buy drinks if they went out.
From NBC:
“You don’t drink ever? Haha,” Roiland wrote. “I’m actually not sure if I’m gonna drink either.”
That night, the woman said Roiland took her to a restaurant near the site of the gaming convention and bought her mixed drinks. She took a video on Snapchat that showed the two of them together and the woman drinking a cocktail.
The woman said she had two drinks and was feeling drunk, and later left the restaurant to go shopping nearby, where Roiland bought her some clothes. After that, Roiland suggested they go back to his hotel room, which she agreed to do.
In the hotel room, she said Roiland asked her to perform oral sex on him. She said she told him no, but Roiland persisted and pushed her head toward his crotch, at which point she said she stopped resisting.
“From the moment it happened, I knew that it was not OK,” she said in an interview. “But I felt a lot of different feelings, like that it was my fault. I felt guilty for asking him to buy me stuff. I felt maybe I owed it to him. And I was embarrassed.”
The woman later confronted Roiland about the encounter and tried to turn it into a sort of teachable moment, telling him “verbal consent is important.”
“That’s not cool at all- jeeeesus,” he replied, “That is not me whatsoever… I literally didn’t get consent??”
In other accounts from those to NBC about their alleged experiences with Roiland while they were underage, he is described as making disturbing comments, including teasingly calling them “jailbait”—a term used to describe underage girls that older adult men, find attractive.
One underage girl says she told him of her aspirations to stream herself playing video games. He responded by saying that once she turned 18 she could do “cam whoring,” a.k.a. online sex work.
“I bet you’d do good,” he wrote to her, “Then once you turn 18 you just start cam whoring.”
The woman, now 23, said that Roiland “got into my head” and that at the age of 19, she did start doing sex work. “When I was 19, I actually signed up to a camming website and tried it. I even messaged him, thinking he’d be proud of me.”
Though the court case against Roiland was dismissed, when those charges were made public, social media was flooded with people sharing personal stories alleging behavior ranging from creepy to abusive, similar to those described above. As a result, Roiland no longer works for Adult Swim, the home of Rick and Morty, and has stepped down from other projects, including Hulu’s Solar Opposites. His roles on both of those shows have been recast for moving forward.
Roiland has yet to respond directly to the new claims but his lawyer, Andrew Bettler, told NBC that the allegations were “false and defamatory.”
(featured image: Greg Doherty/Getty Images)
