Earlier this year a woman named Ayissha Morgan, who appeared on MTV’s Catfish in 2015, posted two videos on her YouTube account detailing sexual misconduct by host Nev Schulman and sexual assault by a PA on the program.
The accusations resulted in a temporary suspension of the show while MTV conducted an investigation using a third party production company Critical Content. Now, speaking to the Daily Beast, Morgan claims investigators never spoke to her regardless of deeming her allegations “not credible” and reinstating the show. She said, “I’m getting death threats because people think I lied, when you [MTV] just wanted to tell people that I wasn’t credible to save your show.” Describing her motive to post the videos in the first place, she said:
“I want myself to have a voice, and I want everyone that it’s happened to to have a voice. And I said: I just don’t want this to happen again. And with the show back on the air, that’s what’s going to happen. They’re just going to cover their tracks better.”
Morgan claims that no one at Critical Content attempted to reach out to her—there were three attempts to contact her, but “it was solely them sending contact information through one of my producers from the show. It was all through a guy named John Maroney, who is one of the producers on Catfish.” Instead, Maroney told Morgan to contact investigators directly. She claims she had every intention of doing so but her lawyer told her not to talk until “we had all of our eggs in one basket and until we knew what was going on with the investigation. And we got the rug ripped out from under us because before we even had all of our stuff together, you know, they had already made their decision, and it just didn’t feel fair.”
She says she was never informed that MTV production would resume:
“Had that happened I would have, you know, disregarded anything my lawyer said and I would have spoken out out of fear that they were going to resume. But they never made anything clear, they never said anything. My lawyer wasn’t even contacted by anyone’s lawyer. Nobody talked to me at all.
I said, this is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. I understand, how long did you expect them to wait before they felt like, OK, we’re just resuming production because we can’t even speak to the girl. But I still feel like they didn’t wait long enough. And I went into this spiral of depression. I felt like I not only let myself down, but I let down all of the other women who came to me that were too afraid to build a case of their own. I mean, I wouldn’t have been surprised had they resumed production while they continued to investigate, that would have been fine for me. But the issue is the fact that this is an extremely serious matter, and you guys haven’t spoken to me, not one word.”
In the two videos posted in May 2018, Morgan describes a host named “Jack” (a pseudonym for Nev Schulman) who approached her during every break while shooting her episode, questioning her sexuality—she is a lesbian, she claims he suggested she was ‘bisexual… I just feel like you haven’t met the right guy yet.’ She also says he propositioned her in a hotel room. In the second video, Morgan claims a female P.A. named “Carol” sexually assaulted after encouraging her to drink heavily.
Morgan told the Daily Beast, “In his statement [Schulman] says he has staff to back him up. I have people on his staff that are saying, yeah, he’s done this before. He’s been creepy, he’s done this numerous times. So whoever you have to back you up is lying!” She adds, “I told everyone everything and no one cared enough to help.”
