"Homer Badman" is the ninth episode of the sixth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons.
Marge hires Ashley Grant, a feminist graduate student, to babysit Bart, Lisa and Maggie.
When he is caught stealing the gummy, Homer makes a makeshift bomb with Pop Rocks and soda to provide cover while he and Marge escape.
That night, Homer frantically searches for the lost gummy Venus until Marge reminds him to drive Ashley home.
The next morning, an angry mob of college students marches onto the Simpsons' lawn, believing Homer sexually harassed Ashley.
The tabloid news show Rock Bottom airs an interview with Homer that is selectively (and poorly) edited and presented out of context to make him look like a crazed pervert.
Lisa and Marge suggest that Homer videotape his side of the story for a public-access cable TV channel, but since it airs during a graveyard timeslot, few viewers see it and it only succeeds in angering a penny-farthing enthusiast.
[6] David Mirkin, the show runner at the time, felt very strongly about the "tabloidization of the media" and has said that the episode was as current in 2005 as it was when it first aired and things have since gotten worse.
[7] The episode also includes parodies of Hard Copy, Sally Jessy Raphael, the Late Show with David Letterman, and media coverage of the O. J. Simpson standoff.