Funnyman John Oliver is facing a lawsuit over an air-rant during which he accused a healthcare executive of thinking “it’s OK if people have s–t on them for days.”
“F–k that doctor with a rusty canoe. I hope he gets tetanus of the balls,” Oliver said in the April 2024 episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight.
The Emmy-winner’s diatribe last year was specifically taking aim at Dr. Brian Morley, the former AmeriHealth Caritas medical director, and his testimony during a 2017 Medicaid hearing about home nursing visits and their costs. Oliver also played audio clips of the comments, which Morley’s lawyers have said were intentionally manipulated and played without context.
“People have bowel movements every day where they don’t completely clean themselves and we don’t fuss over [them] too much,” Morley can be heard saying. “People are allowed to be dirty…You know, I would allow him to be a little dirty for a couple of days.”
In a defamation lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan Federal Court, Morley said he “testified to the opposite” in 2017, and that “he did not equate wiping poorly with leaving anyone sitting in their own feces for days.” He added that Oliver’s suggestion otherwise damaged both his “reputation and personal well-being.”
Morley at the time was trying to explain how many people “may not wipe perfectly,” but that “they’re mobile and they’re not laying in it,” according to the suit. His comments, he emphasized, were about “the average individual who is independently mobile but may not wipe perfectly — not someone who is wearing diapers or otherwise laying in their own bowel movements.”
The suit goes on to contend Oliver’s “feigned outrage” over Morley’s comments were “fabricated for ratings and profits.”
In full, according to the suit, Morley testified: “In certain cases, yes, with the patient with significant comorbidities, you would want to have someone wiping them and getting the feces off. But like I said, people have bowel movements every day where they don’t completely clean themselves and we don’t fuss over too much.”