Reporter Has A 'Haunting Reflection' For Writing A Puff Piece on Nickelodeon Creep Dan Schneider

Last Updated on March 24, 2024

A reporter and stage mom named Melanie VanDerveer wrote an essay for The Blast entitled “My Interview With Dan Schneider: A Haunting Reflection 16 Years Later.” Disgraced Nickelodeon producer Dan Schneider oversaw an operation where child predators preyed on Hollywood minors, according to Quiet On Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV (streaming on Investigation Discovery). The documentary aired as a two-part event and it’s now streaming, and some of its major revelations are getting around in the news cycle.

“After watching the docuseries, I started to feel the ick about talking so highly of someone who was doing such terrible things, that obviously were unknown to the general public back then. So, I unearthed my story and read through it, and OMG! (That’s literally all I could muster up after reading the story),” VanDerveer wrote, telling the story of interviewing Schneider for the Eastern Pocono Community News in 2008.

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“As I began to scan through the aged ink on the page, which were my own words, my heart sank after the first few sentences…,” VanderVeer wrote.

“The story starts out, “Kids are very impressionable, especially that ‘tween’ age so who they idolize should be a positive role model.” I had to take a second to process what I just read. The next line of the story is, “No one knows this better than Dan Schneider, the creator of many positive ‘tween’ shows on Nickelodeon.” It took a few minutes for me to be able to process that, knowing what I know now from watching “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,'” VanDerVeer wrote.

VanDerVeer’s essay is a pretty interesting take on the subject, considering that she became a stage mom herself for her TV actor son, and she would not allow her son to be alone on the set. Will journalists think twice now before writing perfunctory puff pieces on Hollywood wheeler-dealers?

All That and The Amanda Show production assistant Jason Handy, who eventually went to prison for pedophilic acts, had an entire library of child images in his possession when law enforcement nabbed him in 2003.

“It was a picture of him naked masturbating, and he said he had sent it to her because he wanted her to see that he was thinking of her,” a woman from the documentary says about Jason Handy, referring to a photo that Handy sent to her Amanda Show actress daughter.

Another person who worked for Nickelodeon was actually a registered sex offender when he was working for the kid-targeting network, and not surprisingly he got convicted for a pedophilic offense connected to his presence at Nickelodeon.

Former child actor Drake Bell appears in Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV to share his allegations of being sexually abused by dialogue coach Brian Peck.

Drake Bell, 37, had his breakthrough as a teen star on Nickelodeon’s The Amanda Show from 1999 to 2002. The sketch show starred fellow kid actor Amanda Bynes and was created by Dan Schneider who executive-produced the show, among others. Drake Bell was reportedly abused during his Amanda Show tenure, according to Bell’s version of events. Bell went on to star on the Nickelodeon show Drake & Josh, which was also created by Dan Schneider. Brian Peck worked on The Amanda Show.

Dan Schneider, the overweight kid actor on the ’80s sitcom Head of the Class, lost his gig at Nickelodeon, who cut ties with Schneider in 2018 after allegations of on-set inappropriateness including anger issues and wanting women to massage him.

Brian Peck, meanwhile, was convicted for the sexual abuse of a child actor and he served 16 months behind bars. Bell was the victim who put Peck away.

Amanda Bynes has suffered from various public mental health struggles since her career as a child comedic actress, highlighting the toll that Hollywood takes on young impressionable souls.

Bell himself pleaded guilty to child endangerment for allegedly having an inappropriate texting relationship with an underage female fan.

Various other people from the child entertainment industry appear in the documentary. Actors from the ABC show Boy Meets World (1993-2000) previously discussed Peck’s creepy behavior after he guest-starred on Boy Meets World. Will Hollywood ever be fully exposed?

Schneider’s wife Lisa Lillien, a food blogger, said that she can quickly eat an entire box of matzah, having grown up in a “traditional Jewish home,” according to her interview with Oregon Jewish Life entitled “Noshing with “Hungry Girl” Lisa Lillien.”

As we reported in 2022: Ex-Disney Channel star Bella Thorne, 25, revealed an experience that she had when she was ten years old with a show business professional who clearly thought about her in a dirty way, even though Thorne was just a child. Thorne is a product of the Hollywood child-actor system. Thorne starred as a teenager on the Disney Channel series Shake it Up before going on to more mature acting roles.

“I had a director give me feedback once and I was 10. The casting director calls my agent and the agent calls my mom, and they’re like, ‘So she’s not moving forward because the director felt like she was flirting with him and it made him really uncomfortable,’” Bella Thorne stated in an interview with model Emily Ratajkowski, who hosts a podcast using the moniker EmRata. Thorne expressed shock that a director would sexualize her when she was merely ten years old.

“If you need a more f—ed up story about Hollywood and pedophilia and the sexualization of children, I don’t know that there is one,” stated Emily Ratajkowski, who has staked out a progressive political worldview and engaged with hot-button political issues since first coming to fame in the Robin Thicke music video “Blurred Lines.”

Bella Thorne previously revealed in a book that she had been molested between the ages of six years old and fourteen years old, writing, “He didn’t have to deal with the countless times he molested me.”

Hollywood has been under massive scrutiny in recent years for its record of sexualizing children. Disney in particular has garnered scorn from moderate-minded people. Disney has battled against Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis, with the company strongly opposing the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law aimed at protecting young schoolchildren from sexual grooming in the classroom.

Disney fired director James Gunn from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise in 2018 for numerous tweets that appeared to condone or promote pedophilia, but the company re-hired Gunn in 2019.

Tags: Dan Schneider Drake Bell