After days of fan backlash for his silence, Josh Peck has spoken out on the sexual assault of his Drake & Josh co-star Drake Bell by an acting coach.
In a statement released on social media, Peck expressed his support for Bell and other survivors of child sexual abuse who spoke out in the documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, which delved into the alleged abuse of child actors on Nickelodeon by the adults in charge of them.
“I finished the Quiet On Set documentary and took a few days to process it. I reached out to Drake privately, but wanted to give my support for the survivors who were brave enough to share their stories of emotional and physical abuse on Nickelodeon sets with the world,” he wrote Thursday.
A day earlier, Bell had posted on TikTok responding to fan backlash against his co-star Peck, asking them to “go on easy on him” and clarifying that Peck had reached out privately.
In his statement, Peck expressed hope that the documentary would provoke change in Hollywood, where child actors were especially vulnerable.
“Children should be protected. Reliving this publicly is incredibly difficult, but I hope it can bring healing for the victims and their families as well as necessary change to our industry,” he wrote.
Bell revealed in the documentary that he was the minor who testified in 2003 against his dialogue coach Brian Peck (no relation to Josh Peck), who then served 16 months in prison after pleading no contest to two child sexual abuse charges and was required to register as a sex offender. Bell was 15 years old at the time he testified.
