A health-care executive has slapped Last Week Tonight host John Oliver with a lawsuit, alleging the comedian-turned-talk-show-host defamed him in a 2024 episode by twisting his words and making “false accusations.”
The episode in question, which aired in April of last year, linked Dr. Brian Morley, a hospital administrator and former medical director for AmeriHealth Caritas in Iowa, to a drastic decrease in Medicaid services and accused him of thinking “it’s OK if people have s–t on them for days.”
The complaint, filed late last week in the New York Southern District Court, claims that Oliver and his team “entirely snipped out of context and manipulated two sentences of Morley’s testimony” during an administrative proceeding so that they could “accomplish their defamation,” reports Entertainment Weekly.
(For those interested here is the episode. Dr. Morley speaks at 21:22.)
Oh boy. That executive just opened the gates of hell. John will basically pull the entire recorded deposition, make a giant flag out of it, and plant it outside his home for all to see. He will take it and run full page ads in the guys hometown newspaper. He will lobby to have the local sewage treatment plant to have the name be the guys deposition lmao. Good luck homey.
You sue Last Week Tonight when the Streisand Effect just isn’t enough.
“Manipulated 2 sentences,” as in, they played a recording of him saying what he said.
To be fair that can be out of context. I remember a Daily Show segment years ago showing a fox news clip of Obama saying something questionable. It was like only a sentence or two. Stewart, playing up how bad it sounded, asked to the ether if there was some context that could make that ok. The full statement, which fox cut out, was prefaced with the phrase “Now I’m not saying…”
I remember that. I tried searching for the clip, but of course all the old Daily Show clips aren’t available any more. I found a couple of articles (one even with embedded video that no longer works), but here’s the wikipedia article on this specific event.
This is also what caused Bush’s infamous “fool me once, shame on–… Shame on you… You fool me– Can’t get fooled again…” clip. He realized halfway into the first sentence that he was about to hand democrats a crystal clear “shame on me” sound bite to use in all of their campaigns. So he did a hard pivot and avoided finishing the phrase. He got dragged for botching the phrase, but that just played into the “Bush is so dumb” stereotype that already existed.
Last Week Tonight has lawyers who vet what John says. Guaranteed there’s nothing wrong with that episode.
SLAPP suits aren’t about wrong or right. They are about intimidation only. And John is going to kick their ass and make them look like fools in the process
Relevant XKCD LWT.
if you enjoyed the Fuck You Bob segment, wait til you see Fuck You Brian.
