NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Back in 2021, a lawsuit was filed against ‘SNL’ cast member Horatio Sanz on accusations of sexual misconduct against a 17-year-old Jane Doe. The accuser also requested to add Jimmy Fallon, Tracy Morgan, and Lorne Michaels as defendants in the lawsuit, claiming that they enabled Sanz’s behavior. Both Sanz and NBC denied the allegations.
While the lawsuit was eventually settled on November 2022, the accuser reiterated her claims in Maureen Ryan’s newly released explosive book, ‘Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, And A Call For Change In Hollywood.’ In an interview for the book, Doe said Sanz allegedly groped her “in full view of several SNL cast members.” The 2021 suit also connected the incident to Morgan’s infamous parties and alleged that Sanz apologized to the plaintiff in 2019 and said, “After the Tracy [Morgan] party I really tried to fix what I’d done.”
‘No one said anything at all’
Ryan interviewed Doe for her book in May 2022 and wrote that the latter recalled going to an official Saturday Night Live afterparty nearly two decades ago “where she chatted with Michaels about the Jimmy Fallon fan site she ran.” An excerpt from the book published by The Hollywood Reporter read, “After another such gathering, she and Horatio Sanz headed to an after-after party. She consumed alcohol at both parties, and she alleged that at the latter, cast member Sanz put his hands on her breasts and genitals, in full view of several SNL cast members.”
“My control top pantyhose did more to keep me safe than any of those people that I idolized,” Doe told the author. She revealed that she often attended the SNL after-parties between the ages of 15 and 17 and alleged that not only did the other cast members remained silent during Sanz’s alleged assault, they also never raised the issue to company higher-ups.
“I just know that as an adult now in her thirties, if I saw a colleague fingering or getting a minor drunk, getting a fan drunk, and I saw that clearly unbalanced power dynamic. Sanz was clearly pursuing me, physically pursuing me across years of these parties,” Doe alleged. “If I saw my colleague doing that with a teenage fan, I would absolutely intervene or I would go up the chain of command and I would want something to be done. I would want it to be handled. And I don't think that that happened,” she added.
“And I don't know if that was because no one said anything at all,” Doe continued. “And I don't know if that's because, maybe, Saturday Night Live selects employees who happen to be funny and also happen to be the type of people that aren't going to say anything when bad things happen to people — they're just going to keep their mouth closed. I don't know if Lorne just has such a stronghold on everyone,” she added.
A look into Tracy Morgan’s infamous parties
Morgan has long been known in the ‘SNL’ community for organizing wild afterparties in the early 2000s featuring sex workers and free alcohol. Morgan himself wrote about these parties in his 2009 memoir ‘I Am the New Black.’ “Friends of mine were running this illegal strip club they called the Loft. It was in an office space they’d rented and converted into an after-the-after-party spot. They put a stage in it, they put a few futons all around, and they’d get strippers and girls to come and do shows. You’d walk in there and get your d*ck sucked, there was usually some f***ing going on, and there was liquor and couches everywhere,” he shared.
“But this place was just a regular apartment space, so the bar was really just the kitchen, and there was only one bathroom, which usually got stopped up at some point because of all kinds of sh*t getting stuffed in there. I invited everyone to go down there one week. And Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, and a few others came along,” Morgan continued.
“I didn’t tell any of them what they were in for, so it was all cool when we got there. At first, as they got their drinks and sipped them and talked, they thought it was just a private party. Then these two girls came out onstage and started going down on each other and that just shut it down. All the grips and crew guys from SNL were standing around and loving it, but my castmates took one look at that, turned right around, and rushed out of there,” he recalled.
What did celebrity attendees say about Tracy Morgan’s parties?
Several celebrities, especially stars associated with ‘SNL,’ also previously opened up about Morgan’s parties. “Perhaps the most memorable after-after-party was thrown by Tracy Morgan, waaay down at the bottom of Manhattan,” Rachel Dratch wrote about the events in her 2012 memoir ‘Girl Walks into a Bar.’ “We all piled into our cars to go to parts unknown and ended up at a modern apartment building in an area of town I didn't even know existed,” she added.
“Upon entering, we found that interspersed throughout this party, to serve up cocktails or possibly sexual favors, were stripped ladies who were all of a very specific type. I think whoever organized the party—maybe one of Tracy's cronies?—must have been into short, like five feet tall, Latina ladies of square and stocky build,” Dratch continued. “Each and every lady had the look of an ancient Mayan crammed into black fishnets and garter belts, with headband tiaras on their heads for extra sexiness. I think I stayed at that party for about fifteen minutes, and it served as a tipping point—perhaps I had reached an age where I didn't have to go to every after-after-party,” she concluded.
Tina Fey remembered Morgan’s parties in a 2019 New Yorker profile and said, “They were sometimes in, like, a makeshift illegal casino, in an empty loft, and there were women there, serving drinks—women in thongs. He’d be, like, ‘You gotta come to my party!’” Sanz, the primary defendant in the 2021 sexual misconduct lawsuit, himself had a similar review of Morgan’s parties. “The party was fine, but he had these bars set up and he literally hired prostitutes. I’ve never hired prostitutes before because it was never my intention to get us f***ed after a long show,” Sanz said during a 2015 appearance of Kevin Pollak's podcast.
“So he brought in some prostitutes and I just remember, you know, of course, I stayed. I think I was the last one to leave. I just remember that decent people — like Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer — would just come into the bar and do a complete 360. Like, ‘Yep! OK! Good enough!’ And then, you know, [later], the guy who tunes guitars would say, ‘Yeah! I gotta blow job at that party!’” he added.
Was Tracy Morgan's party mentioned in Jane Doe's lawsuit?
One of the key allegations in Jane Doe’s 2021 lawsuit against Sanz mentioned that the latter allegedly assaulted Doe, who was a minor, at an 'SNL' after-party in May 2002. “On this evening and morning, Plaintiff attended two SNL parties, one of which took place at an SNL cast member's loft, where Defendant SANZ openly put his arm around Plaintiff while they talked with other guests and NBC employees/SNL cast members,” the lawsuit claimed in part.
“On this evening and morning, both at the parties and afterwards, Defendant SANZ intentionally touched the Plaintiff’s sexual or intimate parts for the purpose of degrading or abusing Plaintiff and/or for sexual gratification, including: kissing her, groping her breasts, groping her buttocks, and digitally penetrating her genitals forcibly and without Plaintiff’s consent,” it added.
Another allegation mentioned in the lawsuit stated that Sanz apologized to the plaintiff for his behavior at this party in a series of text messages in 2019. Sanz allegedly said he “felt terrible about” the incident and that he was “very sorry” for unintentionally grooming the plaintiff while she was a minor. Sanz also allegedly claimed that he could “swear on a stack of improv books…I’m a different person” and that he “took friendship where it could.”
In one of texts, Sanz allegedly wrote, “after the Tracy [Morgan] party I really tried to fix what I’d done.” Morgan himself wrote about Sanz’s presence on his parties in his memoir and said, “He’s still here. He’s sitting on a couch with two girls. He’s been smoking a cigar and just talking to them for hours. He’s the only one here, man, and he won’t leave.”
