Dan Harmon Finally Addresses Justin Roiland Allegations: ‘I’m Frustrated, Ashamed, and Heartbroken’
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Rick and Morty’s Dan Harmon addressed the sexual assault and misconduct allegations leveled against his co-creator Justin Roiland, as well as the long deterioration of their relationship in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“I’m frustrated, ashamed, and heartbroken that a lot of hard work, joy, and passion can be leveraged to exploit and harm strangers,” Harmon said.
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Roiland was fired from Rick and Morty earlier this year after it was publicly revealed that he’d been charged with domestic violence back in 2020. He’d pleaded not guilty, and the charges were ultimately dismissed in March for lack of evidence. A few months later, nearly a dozen women and nonbinary people came forward to NBC News and accused Roiland of sexual assault and direct messaging underage girls (a lawyer for Roiland called all of the allegations “false and defamatory”).
Speaking after that second report, Harmon said: “The easiest thing for me to say about Justin has been nothing. Easy because he isolated so well and easy because I’m nobody’s first choice as a judge of anything or anyone. This is where I’d love to change the subject to myself, to what a piece of crap I’ve been my whole public life. I would feel so safe and comfortable making this about me, but that trick is worthless here and dangerous to others. It’s other people’s safety and comfort that got damaged while I obsessed over a cartoon’s quality. Trust has now been violated between countless people and a show designed to please them.”
(Harmon, it’s worth noting, faced his own reckoning with misconduct and harassment allegations several years ago: In 2018, Megan Ganz, a writer on Harmon’s breakout show Community, accused him of mistreating her after she rejected his romantic advances. Harmon apologized for his actions on Twitter and his old podcast, and Ganz ultimately forgave him both in public and private.)
In Harmon’s telling, tensions between him and Roiland began to emerge after the success of Rick and Morty’s first season. Harmon bolstered the show with a bunch of professional TV writers — many of whom had worked on Community — thinking it’d be a great way to relieve some of his and Roiland’s workload. Instead, Harmon thinks Roiland saw it as an attempt to make Rick and Morty his show (the show’s origins are an animated short Roiland made in 2006).
“If anything, what I wanted was for Justin and I both to be able to be increasingly lazy and not show up for work,” Harmon said. “That was the dream. We’d be these rich idea men. He could roll around and go, like, ‘What if a genie had a butt instead of a dick?’ And I could be like, ‘Yeah, and plus, we’re going to make people cry about it, and that’s going to make them freak out. It’s a story about a genie butt dick, but then we’d win an Emmy, and it’d be more ironic than ever.’ And then I’d come to find out later that it was like, ‘Oh, Harmon brought in his Harmon writers,’ and, man, that is not how I saw it.” (This quote, and all quotes below, were part of an interview conducted before the second NBC News report about the allegations against Roiland was published.)
While the two discussed these problems at the end of Season Two, they persisted into Season Three. At some point during production, Roiland stopped showing up to the writing sessions but continued to voice the two titular characters, Rick and Morty. Despite the friction, Rick and Morty’s increasing popularity was undeniable, and the two agreed to make an additional 70 episodes after the show’s third season ended in 2017. But two years later, Harmon said, he and Roiland spoke for the last time in an emotionally fraught text message exchange.
Harmon recalled: “He said things that he’d never said before about being unhappy, and I remember saying to him the last time we spoke in person, like, ‘I am worried about you, and I don’t know what to do about that except to give you all the string and also just say I’m scared that you’re not going to come back.’ But then this conversation became unprecedentedly confrontational… I think that’s as far as I get to take the story. At that point, we’re no longer both there for it, and it starts to become not only unfair for me to continue but totally uncomfortable because, from there, a friendship goes away, and I still don’t fully understand why.”
Following Roiland’s ouster, Adult Swim announced that Rick and Morty would continue without him, and eventually, two unknown voice actors were hired to replace him as the main characters (their names still haven’t been revealed). Harmon said he chose not to participate in the talent search out of denial: “It’s all just sad because the goal is for it to be indistinguishable; at the same time, it would be absurd to suddenly decide that the entire foundation of your creative project was, oh, coincidentally, unimportant.”
Rick and Morty recently released a new trailer for its upcoming seventh season, which is set to premiere Oct. 15 on Adult Swim.
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