That August, he was arrested and released on bail. Roiland has pleaded not guilty. The news, which blindsided both his employers and his colleagues, was greeted with an outpouring of other troubling revelations surrounding his online interactions, with multiple women publishing lewd messages they claimed to have received from Roiland. He direct-messaged former Mad magazine editor Allie Goertz, a longtime fan who was prepping a Rick and Morty concept album: “Can you write a song about 9 dikk’s of different sized and ethnic origins hanging above your face, and then in the lyrics describe how they each splatter you with semen.”
He allegedly messaged another woman, who posted the exchange using an anonymous Twitter account and claimed to have been underage when they began corresponding, “You should just run away from home and go into sex slavery YOU fukkING STUPID fakkit bytch (!!!) (Jk).”
During season two, Roiland began pulling away, increasingly uninterested in being in a room that had given him great joy only a season earlier. In fact, at one point, he was sitting so far away from the other writers that in order for him to read what was being written on the whiteboard, he had to grab the pair of binoculars that was in the room to scope out wildlife in the mountains overlooking Burbank. “It was like a visual representation of the problem forming,” says a source, who adds: “He also loved VR, and he kept being like, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could do this show in VR and never have to be near each other?’ And that was the thing: This is a guy who likes being home with his dogs, not in a room with writers, and he wasn’t afraid to say that.”
By season three, Rick and Morty had hired its first batch of female writers, which didn’t stop Roiland and others from doodling penis monsters and other vulgar characters on the office whiteboards. As one show source recalls, Roiland could still be highly engaged and appropriately silly, though too often he was “surly, petulant, uncommunicative and grouchy, like he always wished he was doing something else.” According to another show source, he was easily distracted, too; the writers would regularly walk over to a Toys R Us, where they would buy action figures or Nerf guns, and “then he played with them the rest of the day and we couldn’t get any work done.” Other show sources say he’d derail pitches and interrupt with sophomoric non sequiturs like, “What if his brains were on the outside?” It reached a point where multiple sources say it was easier when Roiland wasn’t in the room.
At some point during the third season of Rick and Morty, multiple sources say Roiland simply stopped showing up — and when he did turn up in the Burbank offices, he’d typically avoid the writers room. In fact, Roiland’s colleagues often knew he was there only because they could hear his dogs. Or they’d hear his remote-control toy car, which had a microphone on top of it, zooming around the office. At least once, Roiland sent it into the writers room, says a source. “You wouldn’t have seen him in weeks, and then you’d see the car come in, which was insane.” Roiland would make exceptions to bring through famous fans, of which Rick and Morty has legions; at various points, his visitors included Kanye West, the comedians on Impractical Jokers and porn star Riley Reid, who gifted the room a succulent.
By that time, Roiland had a girlfriend, who became a fiancée, and he would talk openly about their penchant for threesomes. “It was something we just ignored because it was disgusting,” says an insider. Multiple sources say it was also during that period that Roiland sent a female employee a “really creepy” text, late at night, requesting that she come to his home (they declined to name the staffer). “She didn’t want to run it up the flagpole,” says one of the sources, “and then it was just this really fukked-up, awkward thing.”
Old interviews that Roiland had done were suddenly being resurfaced, too. Back in 2011, appearing on a podcast, he joked that he would be attracted to “a fukking 14-year-old that looks like she’s 18 and [has] big titties” and riffed on Dateline NBC‘s “To Catch a Predator” segments. (In the same breath, he added, “I’m not a pedophile though.”) His work, which has long made comedy hay of subjects like incest and sexual deviance, was now being viewed through a different lens.
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