Boy Meets World star Danielle Fishel, who played Topanga Lawrence in the popular television series, says she was objectified by a “creepy” show executive when she was underage.
“I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday on their calendar,” Fishel told her Pod Meets World co-hosts and former Boy Meets World co-stars Rider Strong and Will Friedle, according to a report by People. “I had a male executive — I did a calendar [shoot] at 16 — and he specifically told me he had a certain calendar month in his bedroom.”
But at the time, Fishel wasn’t aware of how inappropriate those encounters were, as her “immediate thought after that was, ‘Yes, because we are peers, and this is how you relate to peers,’” she said.
“As a kid, I always wanted to be older,” the actress explained. “I always wanted to be an adult. I wanted to be seen as an adult,” she continued. “So getting adult male attention as a teenage girl felt like — I didn’t think of it as being creepy or weird.”
“I felt like it was validation that I was mature and I was an adult and I was capable and that they were seeing me the way I was, not for the number on a page. And in hindsight, that is absolutely wrong,” Fishel added.
Strong concurred with Fishel’s assessment, commented that the actress was “very mature” and “very advanced” as a teenager. Meanwhile, Friedle remarked that he had always viewed her as “confident,” even back then.
“I’ve always been able to hold a conversation with an adult,” Fishel said. “But in a romantic, male-gaze sense, I should not have been outwardly talked about at 14, 15, 16 years old. And I was, even directly to me.”
Fishel went on to say that being objectified at a young age ended up affecting her relationships later on in life.
“I didn’t really process how it affected me as a teenager — or how it affected me in my 20s or even in my 30s — up until the last few years,” she said. “And then I was really able to look back on it and connect the dots.”
Fishel is not the only actress to experience such incidents in Hollywood, and industry known for copious amounts of sexism and sexual harassment — including harassment of underage girls — while it ironically lectures everyday Americans on how to behave.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this month, actress Elle Fanning, the younger sister of actress Dakota Fanning, said she remembers being called “unfuckable” at 16-years-old, which ultimately cost her a movie role.
Earlier this year, Netflix’s Stranger Things star Grace Van Dien said she quit acting after a producer on an unnamed movie suggested she join him for a threesome.
Last year, actress Mena Suvari commented that being pulled into the sex abuse culture of Hollywood helped her nail her role in the 1999 film, American Beauty.
But Hollywood is perhaps most infamous for is the information that came to light in 2017, when three decades’ worth of sexual misconduct allegations against the now-disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein were unearthed. Additionally, many in Hollywood appeared to have known about Weinstein’s behavior over the years, but said nothing about it.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.