At first, actor Drake Bell wasn’t sure he was ready to publicly reveal that he was the previously unidentified minor who had been sexually assaulted by Nickelodeon dialogue and acting coach Brian Peck, who was convicted of child sexual abuse in 2004.
“I think there was a lot of uncertainty up until very recently,” Emma Schwartz, co-director of Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, tells Yahoo Entertainment.
The four-part Investigation Discovery (ID) docuseries examines the toxicity on the sets of Nickelodeon showrunner Dan Schneider’s kid-themed shows — All That, The Amanda Show, Zoey 101, Sam & Cat, Drake & Josh — in the '90s and '00s. In the show, Bell, now 37, revealed he was the minor John Doe who accused Peck of sexual assault and abuse.
Schwartz and filmmaking partner Mary Robertson were deep into exploring that world — interviewing former cast members, writers and crew members about their experiences — when they connected that there were three different men who worked on Nickelodeon sets in that era who had been arrested and convicted of child abuse.
“We really wanted to understand how that had happened,” Schwartz says, “and in the course of having conversations, you start to have whispers of who some of the victims are.”
Bell was introduced to Peck during Season 2 of The Amanda Show in 2000 when Bell was 14 and Peck was 40. In the doc, Bell details how Peck — who had been talked up as having a hand in Leonardo DiCaprio’s early success — glommed on to him, pushing out Bell’s dad and becoming his manager.
In the series, Bell calls the "extensive" abuse “pretty brutal” and says it was “the worst stuff that someone could do to somebody as a sexual assault.” Bell felt trapped. He later broke down to his mother about the abuse, which continued, and they went to police. Bell secured Peck’s confession in a call recorded by investigators. In 2004, Peck pleaded no contest to performing a lewd act with a 14- or 15-year-old and oral copulation with a minor under 16. He served 16 months in prison.
Bell’s identity was kept a secret, and it stayed that way for over 20 years. The filmmakers of the series say much sensitivity was involved when they approached Bell to see if he wanted to share his story.
“Anyone who's a survivor of child sex abuse, you want to be very, very careful and very, very thoughtful,” Schwartz says. “You don't know if they're ready to speak. You don't know if they want to have any outreach — or that if even by reaching out, you could trigger them in some way. So I wrote a letter, and from that letter we began a conversation. It was not an easy conversation, and there was a lot of back and forth before we finally met. And once we met, I didn't know if he would want to move forward. Even once he got to a point where he was ready to share on camera, I don't know that he went home and said, ‘That was the best decision I made in my life.’”
Some of Bell's uncertainty was lifted after filmmakers screened the final project with him.
“I think he felt it really did reflect his truth,” Schwartz says. “And ultimately, as this has come out, has felt a bit lighter from holding in so much for so many years that he's really still trying to grapple with and move forward from.”
Bell — who went on to star in Drake & Josh from 2004 to 2007 — detailed the horrors of what he went through, including going to court to deliver a victim impact statement and seeing Peck’s side of the courtroom filled with Hollywood supporters.
“That was one of the more shocking … revelations that came from the reporting of this,” says Robertson. “And I think for Drake, it was one of the more devastating aspects of a completely devastating experience.”
