John Oliver is facing a new lawsuit.

The comedian is being sued by Dr. Brian Morley, a physician and healthcare official who alleges he was defamed in a 2024 episode of Last Week Tonight that criticized his former employer, AmeriHealth Caritas. 

Morley’s complaint, which was filed in the New York Southern District Court on Friday and has been reviewed by Entertainment Weekly, claims that Oliver and his team “entirely snipped out of context and manipulated two sentences of Dr. Morley’s testimony” during an administrative proceeding so that they could “accomplish their defamation.”

Morley, who worked for AmeriHealth Caritas as a medical director that reviewed patients’ Medicaid requests, seeks $75,000 in compensatory damages, plus special and punitive damages, and also demands that the allegedly defamatory statements be pulled from circulation.

Representatives for Last Week Tonight said in a statement sent to EW, “We strongly dispute this meritless lawsuit and look forward to vigorously contesting it in court. We do not have any further comment on pending litigation.”

Reps for John Oliver did not immediately respond to EW’s requests for comment. An attorney for Morley declined comment. A representative for HBO also declined to comment.

In the complaint, Morley’s attorneys call out Last Week Tonight‘s episode about Medicaid from April 2024, claiming that the host made “false accusations” about the doctor that “were designed to spark outrage” and arguing that Oliver “feigned outrage” that was “fabricated for ratings and profits at the expense of Dr. Morley’s reputation and personal well-being.”

The moment in question came when Oliver discussed disabled patients being denied care from managed care organizations that run Iowa’s Medicaid program, specifically focusing about immobile patients’ care and cleanliness following bowel movements.

The episode played a clip of Morley’s testimony in a 2017 AmeriHealth administrative hearing, where the plaintiff can be heard saying, “People have bowel movements every day where they don’t completely clean themselves, and we don’t fuss over [them] too much. People are allowed to be dirty… you know, I would allow him to be a little dirty for a couple of days.”

Oliver then said, “Look, I’ll be honest, when I first heard that, I thought, ‘That has to be taken out of context. There is no way a doctor, a licensed physician, would testify that he thinks it’s okay if people have s— on them for days. So we got the full hearing. I’m not gonna play it for you. I’m just gonna tell you: he said it, he meant it, and it made me want to punch a hole in the wall.”

Shortly thereafter, Oliver directly addressed Morley, exclaiming, “If I absolutely had to put it into word, I guess I’d say, F— that doctor with a rusty canoe. I hope he gets tetanus of the balls. And if he has a problem with my language there, I’d say, I’m allowed to be dirty. People are allowed to be a little dirty sometimes. Apparently that’s doctor’s f—ing orders.”

Morley’s complaint claims that the Last Week Tonight team “expressly asserted that they were not taking Dr. Morley’s testimony out of context, knowing they had intentionally manipulated the context and their broadcast to convey a defamatory meaning that they knew was untrue.”

The document argues that Morley “did not testify that it is ‘okay’ or medically appropriate for anyone to sit or lay in their own feces, for days at a time or otherwise,” claiming that Last Week Tonight drew false parallels between a “hypothetical” patient that Morley was discussing during his testimony and Louis, a disabled patient who was denied in-home bathing and diaper changing services that he needed. 

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The complaint claims that Morley’s full, unedited quote during the testimony said, “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. People are allowed to be dirty. It’s when the dirty and the feces and the urine interfere with, you know, medical safety, like in someone who has concomitant comorbidities that you worry, but not in this specific case. I would allow him to be a little dirty for a couple days.”

The attorneys also allege that Morley demanded that the statements in question be retracted in October, and that the Last Week Tonight team refused to do so in November.