Drake Bell has given more details about the abuse allegations regarding a teenage girl levied against him in 2021.
On the latest episode of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, Bell explained how he landed himself in that situation in 2021, where he pleaded guilty to a felony charge of attempted child endangerment and a misdemeanor charge of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles. Both charges were related to inappropriate text messages he sent to a teenager back in 2017.
Bell previously broke his silence in an Instagram video. In court, the victim, now 19, said Bell exchanged explicit photos online and engaged in sexual conduct with her on several occasions, including at a 2017 concert venue in Cleveland and at a hotel.
According to Bell, he was "incredibly irresponsible" in responding to DMs from the teenage girl that rolled into allegations that Bell said weren't true.
“I’d responded on some DMs and was incredibly irresponsible, and got myself into conversations that I shouldn’t have had, and I ended up finding out that I was talking to someone that I shouldn’t have been talking to, and it snowballed into these allegations that were not true, and it just turned into this big thing,” Bell explained. “I was being investigated, and that was really difficult on my family, and thankfully through 18 months of subpoenaing my social media and computers and witnesses and everything, it turned out a lot of most of what was being accused of me was not true.”
Bell then explained why he pleaded guilty to felony and misdeameanor charges.
“I did have these conversations and took responsibility for that and ended up pleading guilty, because I just financially was just devastated, and I’d just had a son, and I didn’t wanna put my family through all of this anymore, so I ended up going through the process the way that I did, and you know, very regretful,” he said. “There’s just so much that I’ve had to deal with, and through that, not having the tools, not knowing how to process things, I made a lot of decisions in my life that I shouldn’t have made and hurt a lot of people.”
He also explained how he cut things off after learning the girl was just a teenager.
"I finally found out [her age], and I cut communications. I think she got upset, and she was coming to concerts still, and I was doing everything I could to kind of keep my distance," he said. "Then she made all these allegations of things that happened at a concert, but throughout the investigation, there were witnesses who were there the whole time who refuted it."
He continued, "A lot of the things that she said about sending inappropriate pictures and things like this, it was able to be investigated and show that none of that existed."
Bell also had words for The New York Times, which published inaccurate details about his case and sentencing. In the article, Bell was stated to register as a sex offender and plead guilty to sexual assault, which was false information and took them two years to fix.
In the Times' report of Bell's sentencing, an update is featured at the bottom that reads, "A correction was made on March 18, 2024: An earlier version of this article misstated the punishment that Drake Bell was given in a child endangerment case. He was given probation and community service, but was not required to register as a sex offender."
In the explosive Investigation Discovery docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, Bell revealed he was sexually assaulted when he was 15 years old by dialogue coach Brian Peck, who worked on All That and The Amanda Show.
