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Drake Bell revealed in ID documentary series Silence on the set: The dark side of children’s television who was sexually assaulted by former Nickelodeon speech coach Brian Peck.
The series also redacted the names of people who wrote letters of support to Peck, so the judge could consider them in sentencing. Some of the actors who sided with the convicted abuser, according to the docuseries, included James Marsden, Taran Killam, The boy knows the world starring 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 so far, none of the 41 people who wrote letters on Peck’s behalf have approached him to apologize.
“I have not received an apology or contrition from anyone who wrote letters or was involved in supporting him,” Bell said in an interview in The Sarah Fraser Show podcast.
Bell noted that he knew nothing about the letters until the docuseries asked the court to unseal the documents, adding: “I found out that later, I mean, there were several people who had supported him and who continued to work on Drake and 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, who were my bosses. They were directors, they were producers. It was a situation where I thought I was surrounded, I thought I was safe. I thought, okay, I thought I got rid of it, the cancer is gone, 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 his mind they thought of me in a certain way, and I thought they were my friends.”
Strong and Friedle have publicly claimed that they wrote the letters based on misinformation about the case, to which Bell responded: “To sit there and say, ‘Yes, I did this, but that’s not how they paint it’; I mean, no. I can imagine framing it in a way where 41 people, adults, say ‘Oh, well, that makes a lot of sense, like you’re telling me, that makes sense.'”
X Men Producer Tom DeSanto issued a statement to People saying he wrote a letter “based on incomplete information” and “lacked full awareness of the seriousness of the allegations.” DeSanto apologized to Bell and said that if he “had been fully informed of all of the allegations, my support would have been absolutely denied.”
“This is a very, very difficult thing for everyone involved, and that’s what happens when people like Brian do what they do: it creates a domino effect. And it was very cool of him to do it,” Bell said of DeSanto’s apology.
Kerns also said that he discovered that his letter of support for Peck “was based on completely erroneous information” and that if he had known “what I know now, I never would have written the letter.”