Justin Roiland Trailed By More Sexual Assault Claims, Allegations of Pursuing Young ‘Rick and Morty’ Fans

A new report from NBC News is unveiling alleged encounters between Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland and young fans. The publication reported that between 2013 and 2022, Roiland, 43, was involved with roughly 11 underage women and non-binary people, nine of which the voice actor and animator had sexual conversations with. Three people in the group also claim that they had sex with Roiland.

In the expose are multiple text conversations between Roiland and his accusers, with back-to-back messages from the 43-year-old calling them “cute” or “hot” and begging for responses. With Roiland’s accusers reflecting on being groomed by him, his attorney gave a statement to NBC News, calling the claims “false and defamatory.”

A nonbinary person, Janna Walters, says they were 16 when they first came into contact with Roiland on Twitter. “At first I really thought this guy wanted to be my friend, and I really needed friends at the time,” Waters said. “He was a grown man, I was a teenage girl.”

The two kept in contact intermittently over Twitter before transitioning to text messaging, and when Waters turned 20, they recalled going to Roiland’s residence for a party just a few hours away from her North Carolina home. Roiland allegedly offered Waters a drink and invited two other women to the party where he asked Waters to kiss one of them. Waters declined and drove home, reflecting on Roiland's attempt to ‘groom’ them.

Another alleged encounter stemmed from Tinder, where a then-20-year-old woman matched with Roiland on the dating platform in 2019. “Yes, it’s actually me. Yes, I co-created Rick and Morty,” Roiland’s profile read, and he was in Boston that March for a gaming convention. The woman recalls that Roiland messaged her first, although she never watched Rick and Morty, but was familiar with the show’s success and guessed that the co-creator was wealthy.

The two later met at a bar near the gaming convention, where Roiland purchased the woman drinks because she wasn’t of legal drinking age. The meetup led to the woman becoming intoxicated, and lured back to Roiland’s hotel room, where he allegedly coerced her to perform fellatio on him. “From the moment it happened, I knew that it was not OK,” she said. “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.”

Earlier this year, Roiland received a criminal complaint on domestic violence charges from a May 2020 incident involving his former girlfriend. The charges were later dismissed, with Roiland tweeting a statement about the “horrible lies” he faced, however, he was removed from Rick and Morty along with two Hulu shows Solar Opposites and Koala Man.