Drake Bell criticizes ‘Boy Meets World’ stars for supporting abuser

After sharing his testimony about the “extensive” sexual abuse he survived as a teenager by convicted child molester Brian Peck, Drake Bell is now criticizing other Hollywood figures for supporting his abuser.

He Drake and Josh star called The boy knows the world to actors Rider Strong and Will Friedle for writing letters of support to Peck when the Nickelodeon speech coach was awaiting sentencing for sexually assaulting Bell when she was 15. “RIDER WAS 24 years old when he wrote the letter and Brian told him what he did. He wrote the letter anyway,” Bell wrote in a comment Friday on Zoey 101 star Alexa Nikolas instagram post.

Bell made a similar statement about Friedle in a since-deleted comment on the same post (of which Nikola shared a screenshot), and said that the actor continued working with him on Disney XD. The last Spiderman in the 2010s. “Will was 27 years old and Brian told him what he did,” Bell wrote. “A lot of people turned around and said no, I’m not writing a letter, but they did. Will was not manipulated. Brian admitted it to him and wrote the letter anyway. He then worked with me on many Spider-Man episodes years later and never said a word to me about it.”

Friedle and Strong addressed their relationship with Peck in an episode of their podcast The capsule meets the world in February. “My instinct initially was, ‘My friend, this can’t be. It has to be the other person’s fault,'” Friedle said. “The story makes a lot of sense because of the way he tells it.”

“He didn’t say nothing happened,” Strong explained. “So when we heard about this case and learned something about it, it was always in the context of: ‘I did this, I’m guilty. I’m going to receive whatever punishment the government determines, but I’m a jailbait victim.’ There was this hot guy, I just did this and he’s underage. “And we bought that story. I never heard about the other stuff because, back then, you couldn’t Google it to find out what people were accused of.”

Bell speculated that the actors recorded that podcast because they knew about the Investigation Discovery docuseries. Silence on the set: The dark side of children’s television was about to lay out his support for Peck through recently unsealed court documents. “This is because they were told that (their) letters from her would be made public,” Bell wrote in her Instagram comment. “Everyone thought that the letters would be sealed forever and that no one would ever see them. “This is their publicist telling them how to get ahead of the story.”

Representatives for Friedle, Strong and Bell did not immediately respond to EW’s request for comment.

Friedle expressed his later regret on the podcast. “There’s a real victim here, and he turned us against the victim to the point where we’re now on his team,” she said. “That’s what, for me, I remember as my ever-loving shame about all of this. Being fooled by someone who is a good actor and a manipulator, I could attribute it to my youth and that’s just how it is. It is awful. I’m going to use that for my growth as a human being, but when there’s a real victim involved and now I’m on the abuser’s side, that’s what I can’t get over and haven’t been able to get over. “.

Silence on set revealed that other celebrities, including James Marsden, Taran Killam and growing pains Stars Alan Thicke and Joanna Kerns also wrote letters of support to Peck during the trial. Only Kerns provided a follow-up statement that was included in the documentary: “I now learned that my letter of support was based on completely erroneous information. Knowing what I know now, I would never have written the letter.”

If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to connect with a certified crisis counselor.

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