Drake Bell is opening up about being sexually assaulted by Nickelodeon dialogue and acting coach Brian Peck.
In a new documentary, called Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, which will air on March 17 and 18, it gives a glimpse inside the alleged emotional abuse Nickelodeon executive Dan Schneider and the physical abuse Peck had on the aspiring actors and actresses.
In the documentary, Bell's father, who was his manager at the time, was not happy with how much time Peck was spending with his son.
“I go, ‘I don’t see anything abnormal but it just doesn’t — I don’t have a good feeling,'” he said.
At the time, the actor, who is now 37, didn't give it too much thought, especially since he spent nights at Peck's — but then "one morning" everything changed.
“I was sleeping on the couch where I would usually sleep. I woke up to him — I opened my eyes, I woke up and he was sexually assaulting me. I froze and was in complete shock and had no idea what to do or how to react, and I have no idea how to get out of this situation,” Bell, who was 15 at the time, recalled said.
Peck was "so apologetic," but Bell still didn't know what to do with this secret he had.
“He figured out how to convince my mom and everyone around to, anytime I would have an audition or anytime I needed to work on dialogue or anything, I somehow ended up back at Brian’s house and it just got worse and worse and worse and worse. I was just trapped. I had no way out,” said Bell. “The abuse was extensive and it got pretty brutal. I don’t know how to elaborate on that on camera, really… Why don’t you think of the worst stuff that someone could do to somebody as a sexual assault, and then I’ll answer your question. I don’t know how else to put it.”
Bell didn't go to the police right away, but his girlfriend's mother knew something was going on, especially after Peck kept calling one night when he was at their house.
Bell then realized how "calculated" Peck was. Due to his Hollywood connections, he would threaten Bell. “So it was me believing that I would never be able to do this again… I didn’t want to risk that. I was doing what I loved to do, so I just kept it inside," he said.
Peck then tried to get cast as the dad on Drake & Josh, but Bell refused to let that happen. Bell then told his mom everything, and the police began a "brutal" investigation against Peck.
“I had to be excruciatingly detailed about every single thing, [every] time that it had happened, with two absolute strangers. The worst part was I had to make a phone call to Brian and get him to admit what he’d done,” Bell said. “I said, ‘I’m really struggling with this stuff now. I’m so torn up, I’m so broken, I’m so emotionally distressed right now. Why did this happen?’ He just started a full-on confession. He kept asking me over and over again, he was like, ‘Are we being recorded?'”
“I was losing my hair, I had these big scabs on my head,” he added. “These emotions that were going through me, it’s relief and fear. You know, am I going to survive this?”
Schneider then asked if Peck's arrest had to do with him.
“I was close enough with Dan that I was like ‘Yeah man, this is what he’s been doing.’ Dan just goes, ‘You don’t need to talk anymore about it. That’s all I need to hear. Are you ok? Do you need anything from me? Is there anything that you need?'” he recalled, referring to the August 2003 incident. “Brian was spending so much time around me that it was pretty obvious.”
When Bell started filming Drake & Josh, he didn't "know how to process" everything that had just happened. “I think that led to a lot of self-destruction and a lot of self-loathing. I would try and just escape with alcohol abuse, substance abuse, really just anything to escape," Bell, who has since been arrested and pleaded guilty to charges of attempted child endangerment and disseminating matter harmful to juveniles, said.
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“I was hoping that the outcome would be that he goes to jail, he is there for a while and that he would never be able to work with kids again, which would in turn pretty much mean that you’re not gonna work in Hollywood, because very few productions don’t have a least one kid on the set,” he added. “That’s not what happened at all.”