TW: sexual assault and grooming.
In the early years of the “Me Too” movement we saw a new look into Hollywood and the dark side that goes on behind the camera. Recently, I came across a video series on YouTube by SL04N exposing Dan Schneider that absolutely blew my mind. I didn’t know these things had previously happened and were going on in the shows I was watching!! TW: this article is going to discuss children, sexual assault, grooming, toes, and more.
Dan Schneider is a 55-year-old TV producer that worked for Nickelodeon until 2018 when they parted ways after Nickelodeon paid him seven million dollars. He produced shows like Good Burger (1997), The Amanda Show (1999), Drake and Josh (2004), Zoey 101 (2005), iCarly (2007), Victorious (2010), and even Henry Danger (2014). Schneider is known throughout Hollywood for being a bit weird, there are accounts of him always wanting to be in dressing rooms with his kid actors, alone. It’s also widely known that Schneider and other producers would host “camps” to recruit talent. At these “camps” parents would drop their kids off unsupervised with these adult men producers. The “camps” included basic acting classes along with other events and you were most likely to get noticed by the pool, where you and other attendees could swim and play. The children that attended these camps were ages 13-20 and even actresses like Hilary Duff and Megan Fox were “discovered” at them.
Amanda Bynes, (who I believe needs her whole own article and as much help from the public as Britney Spears) once was so close to Schneider that she would refer to him as her second father. Amanda is currently under a conservatorship (very similar to Britney). And because of it, her parents have complete control over her social media and bank account. Completely discrediting her persona along with it, she has been silenced. Through research, Amanda has reached out to some celebrity lawyer websites and stated this, in a letter about Dan Schneider, “i Don’t know how Any of these meN sleep at night, but if there’s one thing i Do know It’s what’s Done In the dark always comes to lighT.” The odd capitalization spells out “DAN DID IT.” Later she goes on to say, “after the second incident I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to have children or have the family of my dreams.” While we don’t know what this incident is… I find it’s quite clear.
However this is just one of the many things that are awful in regards to Dan and really bring Nickelodeon into question on why they continued to work with him for so long and gave him a big payout when they parted ways.
Alexa Nikolas, who played Nicole Bristow on Zoey 101, describes her experience where she was physically bullied by castmates. Along with that, she states the Spears sisters verbally assaulted her and Dan did nothing but tell her to act professional when Alexa was upset. Schneider is still at fault for this because he is the one who created the environment that allowed this. It was his TV show and this was the culture he promoted.
We also see how Schneider has affected other children who worked on his shows such as Ariana Grande, Jennette McCurdy, Victoria Justice, Jamie Lynn Spears and more. In many of the shows Schneider produced scenes and episodes had strange underlying sexual tones. Many scenes involve feet, toes, and other strange situations that children blindly comply with and we did too, as viewers. But when looking back at these scenes you realize they are completely unacceptable; for child actors to be placed in these situations, and especially to capitalize off them.
Here is a compilation of Ariana Grande being sexulaized as Cat on Victorius. There are literal compilations of characters’ feet shown in shows such as Jennette McCurdy, seen here. He also has a long history of being a little TOO CLOSE to the children he works with here. And literally hundreds of tweets about feet, some in which he posts Jennette McCurdy’s toes, and even asks for his children viewers to send him photos of their feet at home.
THIS video I think makes it extremely apparent how uncomfortable Dan made actors on set in this video taken on set of Victorious. You need to see this video. They are all so visibly uncomfortable, when he walks up, Elizabeth Gillies sits up and pulls Ariana’s skirt down. Liz starts barking at Dan and she asks Ariana to get up off the floor but she doesn’t want to. So, eventually Liz gets up then walks away clearly bothered while Ariana stays on the ground.
While shows like iCarly, Zoey 101, Victorious, and The Amanda Show are ones that we may look back on in a happy light we can’t continue to support this. I personally want to apologize for my recent article talking about iCarly because since learning this I am calling that WE CANNOT CONTINUE TO SUPPORT THESE SHOWS. If more and more people speak up about this inappropriate behavior maybe the actual stars involved would feel comfortable speaking up about their experiences so we can AIR these men out. These types of men control Hollywood. Nickelodeon’s logo even used to be a foot. These men prey on children and traumatize them for life. Nickelodeon should no longer be supported, in addition to this, the recent David Dobrik drama makes this more apparent. Nickelodeon paid Schneider out with seven million dollars to make them look better in light of the 2017 “Me Too” movement which started bringing up the conversation about sexual assault in Hollywood, Nicklodeon feared this may come out in the future. And that future is now.