Drake Bell Calls Out Boy Meets World’s Will Friedle, Rider Strong Over Past Support of His Abuser Brian Peck

Drake Bell continues to speak up for himself after revealing his experience with sexual abuse.

In a series of subsequently deleted comments left on the post of Zoey 101 star Alexa Nikolas who invited Rider Strong and Will Friedle — and their podcast with Danielle Fishel, The floor meets the world – Bell, 37, shared his side of the story regarding the A boy meets the world alum’s involvement in his criminal case against Brian Peck.

Strong, 44, and Friedle, 47, wrote letters advocating for Peck, who was their longtime friend and former A boy meets the world guest star when Bell accused him of sexual assault in 2003. Bell revealed the alleged assault in a new Investigation Discovery series Silence on set: The dark side of children’s televisionhe announced about the case on social networks in the days after the premiere.

“RIDER WAS 24 when he wrote the letter and Brian told him what he did,” Bell wrote in a comment on Nikolas’ post that has since been deleted, suggesting that Strong knew about the abuse he suffered at the hands of Peck before backed him up, according to a video shared by Barstool Sports. “He wrote the letter anyway.”

In another comment that has also been deleted, Bell said Friedle was 27 at the time and “Brian told him what he did,” meaning Friedle knew about the sexual abuse Bell suffered. “A lot of people turned around and said no, I’m not going to write a letter, but [Strong and Friedle] did.”

Bell wrote that Friedle “was not manipulated. Brian admitted it to him and wrote the letter anyway.”

PEOPLE has reached out to Strong and Friedle for comment.

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Will Friedle and Rider Strong attend the 2022 iHeartRadio Wango Tango at Dignity Health Sports Park on June 4, 2022 in Carson, California.

Tommaso Boddi/Getty

After Friedle supported Peck in court — Peck, Bell’s former dialogue coach, who “was convicted in 2004 of his crimes against Drake and ordered to register as a sex offender,” Warner Bros. said. Discovery in a press release shared with PEOPLE — went to work with Drake & Josh actor “on many many episodes Spider man years later and he never said a word to me about it,” Bell wrote in a comment.

According to Bell, two A boy meets the world students spoke about their former friendship with Peck on a February episode of the podcast as they learned their “letters would be made public.”

“Everyone thought the letters would be sealed forever and no one would ever see them. This is their publicist telling them how to get ahead of the story,” his comment concluded.

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On an episode of their podcast last month, Strong said he hung out with Peck “all the time” while Friedle noted how Peck “intruded into my life so much.”

“The person he presented was a great, funny guy who was very good at his job and you wanted to hang out with him,” he added. – I saw him every day, hung out with him every day, talked to him every day.

Friedle said that when Peck told him about his arrest — which was on a charge of lewd acts with a child, according to an August 2003 LAPD press release — he told him it was “not his fault” and “clearly is that it is his victim’s fault.”

Peck “turned us against the victim,” Friedle argued.

“My initial instinct because of the years I spent with him was like, ‘Well, yeah, sure, it can’t be you. It can’t be. Right, you’re innocent. It can’t be,'” Friedle continued to recall. . “So you go up to a guy that you now look up to as an adult and you say, ‘He’s terrible.’ And my instinct at first was, ‘Well, my friend can’t be [this person], this cannot be. So it must be another person’s fault, there must be a story.”

“Sure, that makes perfect sense. The way he says it and ‘You’re damn right, that kid’s guilty. How dare he?’ I look back on it now as an adult and it makes me cry that I was ever so naive,” he added.

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Everett

As for Strong, he said Peck “didn’t say nothing happened,” but instead suggested that “the victim is prison bait.”

“In those days, you couldn’t Google what people were charged with,” Strong said, before speculating that he “took a plea deal and admitted one thing — which is all he admitted to us — but it looks like he was charged with a number of crimes that we didn’t know about.”

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Reflecting on their involvement in the case — both wrote letters to the judge in Peck’s defense and appeared in court to support him — Friedle admitted they were “sitting in that courtroom on the wrong side of everything.”

“The victim’s mother turned around and said, ‘Look at all the famous people you brought with you. And that doesn’t change what you did to my child,'” he recalled. “I was just sitting there wanting to die. It was like, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ It was horrible across the board.”

“We haven’t been told the whole story, but that doesn’t change the fact that we did it,” Friedle added. “I still can’t find the words to describe all the things I feel inside.”

If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the crisis line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.

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Source: HIS Education