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8 months ago
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Drake Bell revealed on the ID docu-series Quiet On Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV that he was sexually assaulted by former Nickelodeon dialogue coach Brian Peck.
The series also dropped the names of people who wrote letters of support for Peck, so the judge would consider them in the sentencing. Some of the actors that sided with the convicted abuser, according to the docu-series, included James Marsden, Taran Killam, Boy Meets World stars Rider Strong and Will Friedle, as well as Growing Pains parents Joanna Kerns and the late Alan Thicke.
In a recent interview, Bell said that as of now, none of the 41 people who wrote letters in favor of Peck have reached out to him to apologize.
“I haven’t gotten an apology, or a sorry, from anybody that had written letters or was involved in supporting him at all,” Bell said in an interview on The Sarah Fraser Show podcast.
Bell noted that he didn’t know about the letters until the docu-series petitioned the court to have the documents unsealed, adding, “I learned that later, I mean, there were multiple people that had supported him that went on to work on Drake & Josh.”
He continued, “And I worked with these people every day, and I thought they were my friends. They were people in positions of power, that they were my bosses. They were directors, they were producers. It was a situation where I thought I was surrounded by, I thought I was safe. I thought, OK, I thought I got rid of, the cancer has been carved out, we’re better now. And I had no idea that for four years, I was working alongside people who had supported him, and probably in the back of their mind were thinking of me in a certain way, and I thought they were my friends.”
Strong and Friedle have claimed publicly that they wrote the letters based on misinformation about the case, to which Bell said, “To sit there and say, ‘Yes, I did this, but it’s not how they’re painting it’ — I mean, I can’t imagine framing it in a way where 41 people, adults, say ‘Oh, well that totally makes sense, how you’re telling me, that makes sense.'”
X-Men producer Tom DeSanto released a statement to People saying he wrote a letter “based on incomplete information” and “lacked full awareness of the gravity of the accusations.” DeSanto apologized to Bell, saying that if he “had been fully informed of all the accusations, my support would have been absolutely withheld.”
“This is a very, very tough thing for everyone involved, and that’s what happens when people like Brian do what they do — it creates a ripple effect. And so that was really cool of him to do,” Bell said of DeSanto’s apology.
Kerns also said that she found out that her letter of support for Peck “was based on complete misinformation,” and if she had known “what I know now, I never would have written the letter.”
