Drake Bell has vehemently denied the allegations that he groomed a teenage girl nearly three years after being arrested for “crimes against a child.”
The “Drake & Josh” alum said Tuesday that the claims were “not true” and that he only pleaded guilty because he had been financially “devastated” at the time.
“I responded on some DMs and was incredibly irresponsible and got myself into conversations that I shouldn’t have had,” he said on Dear Media’s “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast.
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“I ended up finding out that I was talking to someone that I shouldn’t have been talking to, and it snowballed into these allegations that were not true, and it just turned into this big thing.”
Bell, now 37, pleaded guilty in June 2021 to a felony, attempted child endangerment, and a misdemeanor, disseminating matter harmful to juveniles. He was sentenced to two years of probation.
“I had just had a son, and I didn’t want to put my family through all of this anymore,” he told podcast host Amanda Hirsch. “I ended up going through the process the way that I did. Very regretful.”
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The former Nickelodeon star said he ceased communication with the unnamed woman, to whom he had been talking for three years, as soon as he found out she was 15 years old.
“I was doing everything I could to kind of keep my distance,” he shared. “A lot of the things she said about sending inappropriate pictures and things like this, it was able to be investigated and show that none of that existed.”
Bell said he took “responsibility” for “having those conversations” with the teen.
“There’s just so much that I’ve had to deal with, and through that, like I said, not having the tools or not knowing how to process things, I made a lot of decisions in my life that I shouldn’t have made and hurt a lot of people,” he told Hirsch, alluding to the sexual abuse he faced by his Nickelodeon dialogue coach Brian Peck.
“But now, where I am in my life now, I think that I’m finally at a place where I can process and deal with this through therapy, that I’ve been through and actively going through, unearthing all of these things and being able to face them head-on for, really, the first time in my life.”
Bell recently detailed the “extensive” abuse he suffered from Peck, now 63, for the first time in the Investigation Discovery docuseries “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV.”
“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,” the former “All That” star recalled.
“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.”
In 2003, Peck, then 43, was arrested on 11 charges, including sodomy, a lewd act against a child and oral copulation by anesthesia or controlled substance.
One year later, the TV producer was convicted of sexually abusing an unknown child actor — as Bell’s name had not been released to the public at the time — and sentenced to 16 months in prison.
