Months after the release of the explosive documentary Quiet on Set, Ariana Grande has broken her silence and addressed the “devastating” allegations.
Though ID’s true crime series focused much of its time on the child sex offenders working for Nickelodeon back in the 00s, including dialogue coach Brian Peck, it also accused Dan Schneider of featuring inappropriate skits in a number of his hit TV shows.
Before making a name for herself as a pop star, Grande starred in Victorious and Sam & Cat, with Quiet on Set placing renewed focus on scenes that were deemed too sexual for a teenager to act out.
The Wicked star has now addressed the various allegations made by those who came forward, saying on Penn Badgley’s Podcrushed podcast she found the experiences a number of her co-stars had “devastating.”
“Obviously, my relationship to [child acting] has, and is currently, changing. I’m reprocessing a lot of what the experience was like,” she explained on the Podcrushed podcast.
“I think that the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting. I think there should be therapists. I think parents should be allowed to be wherever they want to be.
“Not only on kids’ sets. If anyone wants to do this, or music, or anything at the level of exposure… there should be in the contract something about therapy is mandatory twice a week or thrice a week, or something like that.”
Speaking about the survivors who came forward in Quiet on Set, Grande said, “There’s not a word for how devastating that is to hear about. I think the environment just needs to be made a lot safer all round.”
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Even before the docu-series dropped, fans would regularly post compilations from Grande’s time on Victorious with fresh eyes, deeming them inappropriate for a child actor to do.
Some of these include shots of the singer putting her toe in her mouth, pouring water on herself, and squeezing a potato with her eyes closed, asking for it to “give up the juice.”
The singer went on to say on the podcast, “Speaking specifically about our show, I think that was something that we were convinced was the cool thing about us — is that we pushed the envelope with our humor. And the innuendos were told… it was like the cool differentiation.
“I don’t know, I think it just all happened so quickly and now looking back on some of the clips I’m like, ‘Damn, really? Oh sh*t’… and the things that weren’t approved for the network were snuck onto like our website or whatever… When going into it, I guess I’m upset.”
Quiet on Set is available to stream on Max now. You can read more about what the bonus Episode 5 got right, the Brandi Carlile confusion, and the actors who defended Peck during his trial.
For more true crime, read about the upcoming Sherri Papini Perfect Wife documentary, how to watch the Herb Baumeister documentary, and whether Ashley Madison’s Sam and Nia Rader are still together.