Creators of shows including SpongeBob SquarePants, Adventure Time, and Rick and Morty have cited Ren & Stimpy as an influence. Stern called Sody Pop “a hot chick with big cans and nice legs.” Kricfalusi responded with a smile: “She’s underage, too.”Īnd yet Kricfalusi, 62, continues to be widely celebrated as a pioneer in the male-dominated field of animation. In an interview with Howard Stern in the mid-’90s, the radio host asked him about a character in the comic book anthology the cartoonist was then promoting. Moreover, Kricfalusi made his fixation on teenage girls plainly obvious in his art, even as he worked on animated projects for the likes of Cartoon Network, Fox Kids, and Adult Swim. The male artists said stories of how Kricfalusi sexually harassed female artists, including teenage girls, were known through the industry. Tony Mora, an art director at Warner Bros., and Gabe Swarr, a producer at Warner Bros., worked alongside Byrd at Spumco. In some ways, the old transgressions are the most uncomfortable: They implicate not just the alleged abusers, but everyone who knew about the stories and chose to overlook them.Īlthough sexual abuse allegations against Kricfalusi have never been made public before, his relationship with Byrd has been an open secret within animation - so open that “a girl he had been dating since she was fifteen years old” was referenced briefly in a book about the history of Ren & Stimpy.
Since October, a national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment has not only felled dozens of prominent men, but also caused allegations made in the past to resurface. She told herself that Kricfalusi was helping to launch her career in the end, she fled animation to get away from him. After finishing her senior year in Tucson, the tiny, dark-haired girl moved in with Kricfalusi permanently at age 17. In the summer of 1997, before her senior year of high school, he flew her to Los Angeles again, where Byrd had an internship at Spumco, Kricfalusi’s studio, and lived with him as his 16-year-old girlfriend and intern. She said that on the same trip, in a room with a sliding glass door that led to his pool, he touched her genitals through her pajamas as she lay frozen on a blanket he’d placed on the floor. And then, when she was still in 11th grade, he flew her to Los Angeles to show her his studio and talk about her future. “I thought I was still his little cute friend,” she said. He visited her at the trailer park where she lived in Tucson, Arizona. He helped her get her first AOL account, through which he convinced her he could help her become a great artist. Soon, she said, she began receiving boxes of toys and art supplies from 39-year-old Kricfalusi, better known as John K.
“I had built up these characters and this mythos of Ren & Stimpy in my head,” Byrd, now 37, told BuzzFeed News. John Kricfalusi’s effusive letter, Byrd said, seemed like the first step toward her dream. It was 1994, and the 13-year-old had sent the creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show a video of herself talking about her drawings and the animation career she envisioned she thought if she got the attention of the studio behind the hit Nickelodeon show, she might get a job there someday. Robyn Byrd thought her plan was working when the letter from her hero arrived in the mail.