Drake Bell Forgives Rider Strong After He Wrote Letter Of Support For His Abuser: “We Are Healing Together”

By Michael Haskoor @Tweetskoor
Published April 7, 2024, 9:00 a.m. ET

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Drake Bell says he forgives Boy Meets World star Rider Strong after he wrote a letter of support for his abuser Brian Peck in the early 2000s.

The Drake & Josh star said he spoke to Strong after criticizing him and others for their letters supporting Peck, who was convicted of child molestation and spent time in jail.

“I just had the most amazing conversation with @RiderStrong,” Bell posted on social media Friday. “We are all healing together. I have nothing but love and forgiveness for him.”

Bell has been at the center of the controversy stirred up by the new Investigation Discovery docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, which debuted last month.

The producers of the docuseries petitioned the court to unseal documents related to Bell’s John Doe abuse case, revealing 41 letters of support for the former Nickelodeon dialogue coach. In addition to Strong, some high-profile celebrities who wrote letters included Will Friedle (who also appeared in Boy Meets World), James Marsden, Taran Killam, and Growing Pains stars Alan Thicke and Joanna Kerns.

Shortly before Quiet on Set premiered, Strong and Friedle discussed their relationship with Peck on their podcast Pod Meets World.

“He didn’t say that nothing had happened,” Strong said on the show. “So by the time we heard about this case and knew anything about it, it was always in the context of, ‘I did this thing. I am guilty. I am going to take whatever punishment the government determines, but I’m a victim of jailbait. There was this hot guy. I just did this thing, and he’s underage.’ And we bought that storyline. I never heard about the other things because, back then, you couldn’t Google to find out what people were being charged with.”

After Quiet on Set premiered, Bell said he had yet to receive a private apology from anyone who wrote the letters supporting Peck and criticized them for believing the disgraced dialogue coach.

“To sit there and say, ‘Yes, I did this, but it’s not how they’re painting it’ — I mean, I can’t imagine framing it in a way where 41 people, adults, say, ‘Oh, well that totally makes sense, how you’re telling me, that makes sense,’” Bell said on The Sarah Fraser Show.

Bell had also previously called out Strong and Friedle on Instagram for supporting Peck.

“RIDER WAS 24 years old when he wrote the letter and was told by Brian what he did. He wrote the letter anyway,” Bell commented on an Instagram post by Zoey 101 star Alexa Nikolas.

Bell wrote another comment on the post about why he thinks Strong and Freidle discussed the letters on their podcast that he later deleted, but Nikolas shared a screenshot.

“This is because they were told [their] letters are going to be made public,” he wrote. “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.”