By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | March 19, 2024 |
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | March 19, 2024 |
This is a complicated story. Also trigger warning for sexual assault involving minors.
The third and part of the fourth episode of Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV centers on Drake Bell’s account of being repeatedly sexually abused by Nickelodeon’s dialect coach, Brian Peck (no relation to Bell’s Drake and Josh co-star, Josh Peck). It’s a disturbing account that not only involved sexual abuse, but Peck also drove a wedge between Bell and his father and manipulated the situation so that Peck essentially became the adult in Bell’s life. He drove Bell to work, and Bell frequently stayed in his home. While there, Peck repeatedly abused him, according to Bell’s account.
Bell felt trapped and unable to tell anyone until his girlfriend’s mom caught on to the fact that Peck’s relationship with Bell was suspicious. This led to therapy which ultimately led to Bell confessing to his mother that Peck had been abusing him for months. Peck was arrested, and he was eventually charged with 11 counts, including sodomy, lewd act upon a minor, and oral copulation by anesthesia or controlled substance. He pleaded guilty to two charges, served 16 months in prison, and registered as a sex offender.
It’s an upsetting account, all the more so when it is revealed that, during sentencing, Peck’s side of the courtroom was full of people — including some other child stars — there to support him, many of whom wrote letters on Peck’s behalf. They include James Marsden, Taran Killam, Will Friedle, and Rider Strong, the latter two of whom were cast members on Boy Meets World. Those letters have been publicly released, and the two from Strong and Friedle are galling considering the charges against Peck.
On a recent episode of their Pod Meets World podcast, Friedle and Strong addressed their support of Peck. They were in their mid-20s at the time, and they claim they were manipulated by Peck into believing that Peck was a victim.
“We were sitting in that courtroom,” Friedle said on the podcast, “on the wrong side of everything, of course having no idea. It was filled with child actors, to the point that the victim’s mother turned around and said: ‘Look at all the famous people you brought with you, and it doesn’t change what you did to my kid.’”
“There were a lot of us there who were very recognizable,” Friedle continued. “[Peck] had Rider and I write letters of support to the judge, and these were things that we did. And, again, we did them because we were lied to. We weren’t told the whole story. But that doesn’t change the fact that we did it.”
“The idea that I didn’t know, couldn’t spot it, that was my own failure, in my mind. I don’t even know how to put half of what I’m feeling into words … In my head, there’s no excuses —- how did you not see this?!”
“There’s an actual victim here, and [Peck] turned us against the victim to where now we are on his team. And that’s the thing where, to me, I look back at that as my ever-loving shame,” he continued. “When there’s an actual victim involved, and now I’m on the abuser’s side? That’s the thing I can’t get over, and haven’t been able to get over.”
Friedle and Strong were apologetic on the podcast and claimed that Peck manipulated them into believing he was a victim “of jailbait.” Were Friedle and Strong naive to believe Peck? Yes. But it’s also clear from Bell’s own account that Peck was capable of manipulation.
Nevertheless, Bell has recently taken issue with Friedle and Strong for writing letters supporting Peck. He suggested in Instagram comments that Friedle and Strong were not remorseful, only that they were trying to shape the narrative. “This is their publicist telling them how to get ahead of the story,” he wrote. When other commenters claimed that Friedle and Strong were minors and victims of Peck’s manipulation, too, Bell insisted otherwise, saying they were not minors and that they knew what Peck had done but had chosen to support him, anyway.
The story is further complicated by the fact that Drake Bell himself has largely been out of the public eye in recent years after he was arrested and pleaded guilty to charges of attempted endangering of children and disseminating matter harmful to juveniles in a matter involving an online relationship Bell had with a 15-year-old (that began when the minor was 12). His accuser also alleged that Bell sexually assaulted her when she was a minor.
Bell took the plea deal, he said, to quickly resolve the situation so that he could move on with his life, though he claimed that no images of a sexual matter were exchanged, nor was any physical behavior involved. He added on Quiet on the Set that there was a lot of misinformation about the matter online. However, he did not elaborate, clarify the misinformation, or seek to set the record straight about those charges in the docuseries.
Many things can be true at once. Bell was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Brian Peck. Years later, Bell also acted inappropriately with a minor. Friedle and Strong were manipulated by Peck into writing letters of support, but they should have known better. They could also be genuinely remorseful, but they may have also acted in their own interests to get ahead of the story.