An Iowa doctor is suing John Oliver for defamation, claiming comments he made were taken out of context in a 2024 episode of Last Week Tonight.
In an episode focused on Medicaid last April, Oliver recounted how “there was a nearly 900 percent increase in members being illegally denied services.” To illustrate the severity, he showed a 2018 news report from Al Jazeera about one of those cases: a cerebral palsy patient whose in-care nursing visits dropped from multiple times a day to once every six weeks after private insurer AmeriHealth Caritas took over Medicaid cases in Iowa. The patient’s daily visits had included bathing and diaper changes.
“That’s obviously maddening,” Oliver told viewers, “and it doesn’t get any better when you hear a doctor at AmeriHealth… explaining in a hearing about a similar patient just what the corporate thinking was about the necessity of keeping people clean.” He then played audio from Dr. Brian Morley, taken from testimony he made in an administrative hearing in 2017.
“People have bowel movements every day where they don’t completely clean themselves, and we don’t fuss over [them]. People are allowed to be dirty… You know, I would allow him to be dirty for a couple of days,” Morley is heard saying.
“When I first heard that, I thought that has to be taken out of context,” Oliver reacted. “So we got the full hearing… He said it, he meant it, and it made me want to punch a hole in the wall,” adding “f*ck that doctor with a rusty canoe. I hope he gets tetanus of the balls.”
But according to Dr. Morley, his comments were taken out of context. That’s the basis of a defamation lawsuit filed against John Oliver and Last Week Tonight co-producers Partially Important Productions. Though Oliver prefaced Morley’s comments in the segment as being about a “similar patient,” Morley says they were not about a similar patient, but rather one who “was not confined to a wheelchair, was not incontinent, did not wear diapers… and did not require in-home diaper changing or assistance to bathe generally.” Morley also states that he “approved nearly 6 in-home visits per week” to the patient he was speaking about.
The doctor, who include screenshots of YouTube comments showing the backlash he’s received from Last Week Tonight viewers in his complaint, is seeking compensatory damages, special damages, punitive damages, and attorney’s fees from Oliver and team Morley is also demanding a public retraction from Oliver, and the removal of the content from all platforms. (He claims that Oliver and Partially Important Productions refused to retract the statements when asked last year.)
For now, Last Week Tonight’s segment on Medicaid remains online, including the portion focused on Morley, which can be viewed in full below:
