Is Nickelodeon really a cesspit of child abuse?

Cafe Society
1

I hope this is the right forum for this question. I need educated opinions on this subject.

So I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole and wound up on a video of Amanda Bynes on the Howie Mandel show in 1999.

Amanda was noticeably hyper, but as someone who used to watch All That and the Amanda Show as a child, I believed her to just be a child with a ton of energy.

Then I started reading the comments. They were shocking. There were hundreds of them, roughly 95% of which were talking about how she was high on adderall and/or cocaine at the time, about how she was drugged with the substances prior to filming the interview and was routinely pumped full of adderall for her own show, despite only being 12. Some people even said that the cast of All That had confirmed it at some point in time.

Naturally I did some googling. I was unable to find any evidence of the All That cast making such a statement. What I did find were multiple articles about an interview she did in 2018 where she details her drug addiction. According to her, she didn’t so drugs until she was 16 when she began smoking pot, and then later she tried harder things like ecstasy and Molly. She mentioned cocaine as a drug she tried once or twice but wasn’t able to get high from (which I guess could suggest she was given it as a child and got too accustomed to it). She finally mentioned adderall as something she discovered as an adult, having read about it in a magazine and utilizing it as a weight loss aid.

I mentioned this interview in a comment on the YouTube video, and people responded with “she’s lying, I rarely believe celebs, she’s in a conservatorship so her parents obviously told her what to say to avoid scrutiny, etc”.

I watched more videos, including those click baity videos with titles like “Amanda Bynes’ disturbing history with Dan Schneider EXPOSED” by some gossip YouTuber named Sl0an. Those videos have hundreds of comments and they’re almost all stuff like “Nickelodeon is a cesspit, kids get molested backstage all the time, all the kids are given adderall so they have lots of energy, Dan Schneider molested Amanda Bynes and Ariana Grande and that girl from iCarly and he’s the father of Jamie Lynn Spears’ baby, etc”.

Typically I would take such comments with a grain of salt but it was the sheer volume of them that made me wonder if there was some legitimacy to them - they were speaking as though they were citing actual facts that had been proven.

I realize that the entertainment industry has a dark side but I don’t want to believe it’s as bad as these people are making it out to be. I grew up on Nickelodeon so I don’t want it to be a factory that takes in innocent kids, pumps them full of drugs and alcohol, molests every one whose parents turn their backs, and spits out fucked up teens with no future when the show ratings drop too low. I’d rather believe that, just like in the regular world, it’s a few bad apples instead of a system wide problem.

So can you smart people help out this dope? Does anyone have any insight or can you at least discern better than I can between true and false?

Thanks!

2

What’s the source for this purported information? It’s obviously not Bynes herself. And there’s obviously no source that any law enforcement agency considered actionable, or the perpetrators would be in prison.

And why shouldn’t one believe her? If she’s telling the truth about her later drug addictions, why wouldn’t she be telling the truth about when she started?

3

Ehhh, I don’t think that would require one to have been given it as a child. I’ve tried cocaine a few times. The expected effect on some parts of my nervous system happens - the part of my body it’s applied to goes numb, my heart rate increases. The expected psychological effects do not happen. I instantly get a headache, everyone one around me is an asshole that I can’t stand to talk to anymore, and I just want to go home and be alone until this crap wears off. It’s about like going to the dentist, only nobody is handing out nitrous oxide to make it not suck.

A friend who used to be a cocaine fiend told me “Wow, it sounds like you just go straight to the coming down part of doing cocaine.” It’s always been that way with me.

4

Unless things have changed from the mid-90s, there is no Nickelodeon Studio. The shows, like all shows these days, are done by production companies. There might be a problem with one show, but that doesn’t extend to others.
My daughter had a continuing role on a Nick series. No drugs or drugged kids that I ever saw - that would be unprofessional, and one kid who acted unprofessionally got his butt fired.
No Nick people on set I ever saw, but I wasn’t on that much.

5

People who are repeating crap they’ve read online (and choose to believe) have no legitimacy. They don’t have any connection with the shows. The “sheer volume” is simply the echo chamber of people spewing back out what they’ve read from each other on similar sites.

6

There is the gossip site Crazy Days and Nights which post anonymously sourced “blind items” where they never outright say who they are talking about and you have to guess who they are talking about. Something like this:

“This A list actor who had a big hit in the past three years is cheating on his b list actress wife” (Not a real one just an example of how they post.)

7

And, that timing would line up with when Bynes was working on All That (she was on it from 1996-2000); Wikipedia indicates that that show was produced by Tollin-Roberts Studios; they made several shows for Nickelodeon, as well as a number of prime-time comedies and dramas for the major networks.

8

Honestly I don’t know what the original source is. It’s almost like playing a game of telephone.

9

This is veering awfully close to asking people to prove a negative which is a mug’s game as far as I’m concerned.

I could imply my neighbor horribly tortures and mutilates puppies without making a definitive statement. But my neighbor could not provide evidence for or against it even if I just made it up.

In the absence of any actual evidence, it’s innuendo and implication, which is often enough in today’s society.

10

So why repeat unsubstantiated rumors?

11

I don’t think (s)he was repeating rumors so much as asking if they were true. It wasn’t being asked in a conspiratorial tone, at least not to my interpretation of the OP.

Oh, and @AtheistZara, welcome to the Dope! Enjoy your stay!

12

Thank you so much!

13

I have a friend who’s gone down rabbit holes like this, where he just HAD to know if this or that rumor was true.

Nothing good came from that. He had to detox by avoiding all gossip ('cause that’s what it is), in person and online. His addiction also included politics, and he was a real pain during the Trump years and the run-up to the last election.

And now he’ll repeat the mantra “I don’t need this in my life”.

We kid him that he has to find the checkout aisle without any tabloid newspapers… (then we whisper “Bat Boy is reeeeal… and he’s carrying Elvis’s alien baby.”)

So here’s to a quick and painless detox. Rip that band-aid off fast!

14

Well, I’ve heard that the kids on Nickelodeon got green slime dumped on them.

15

Yeah, YouTube commentors are often huge trolls. I would take the veracity of anything you read in YT comments with a huge grain of salt, like maybe this size:

16

While it’s not evidence, I have to think that if Nickelodeon was a cesspit of rampant sexual assault and abuse since the mid-90s, we’d have heard a lot more about it when the MeToo thing was going full swing. Certainly individual victims may choose to stay private but, as the OP describes it with virtually no one escaping unscathed, you’d think someone would have started the ball rolling if it was that bad.

17

I read the book Slimed: An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age (so the 80s to the early 90s, pre-All-That) and there wasn’t anything in there that alluded to a bad culture at the time. There are interviews with both adults (writers, producers, directors) and kids (actors at the time).

18

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was another QAnon rumor being tried, in line with the Tom Hanks thing. But I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that there’s any basis to it.

19

I have a guess of where it came from. It’s one of those things that grew in the telling.

There’s this one showrunner who some people thought seemed to have a bit too much fascination with feet showing up in his shows. This ballooned into a rumor about him abusing the stars of his shows in sexual ways. There was even apparently an internal investigation, but it turned up nothing.

The showrunner did wind up being fired, and people took it as proof the allegations were true, but notably none of the stars of the shows had anything bad to say about him. The common refrain was that he hadn’t done anything untoward to them.

There’s also an old Nick star, Drake Bell, who got caught with underage girls. You’ll note that I actually named him, since he was actually accused and convicted of grooming a girl since she was 12. However, this was after he was no longer on the network, and there are no reports of him doing anything at the time of his show. (He was, after all, mostly a kid himself at the time.)

Throw in the stuff about Amanda Bynes (which I won’t mention here), and I can see how this turned into some rumor that Nickelodeon itself is bad. I mean, we’ve all seen how child actors can get so messed up.

But, absent any actual accusations to go off of actual sexual abuse on the shows, I don’t see any reason to believe that Nickelodeon ever was anything like that.

20

No this has nothing to do with QAnon, the Dan Schneider rumors have been going since pre-Trump presidency.

Dan Schneider left Nick at the height of his power in 2018 at Nick with multiple successful shows running under mysterious circumstances. It’s been proven he’s a horrible abusive boss but the sexual misconduct rumors have always dogged him but never proven. However he very much does seem inclined to oversexualize the teen actors in the TV shows he writes for. Not to mention on Twitter an infamous episode where he asked preteens to send him pics of their feet.