After “Quiet On Set” Viewers Were Left Heartbroken For Drake Bell’s Dad, Drake Has Admitted That He Hoped It’d Be “Cathartic And Beneficial” For Him To Be Involved In The Documentary

In 2021, Drake was sentenced to two years probation and 200 hours of community service after being charged with attempted endangering of children and disseminating matter harmful to juveniles. Drake initially pleaded not guilty, but later agreed to a plea deal and said that he was guilty of both charges.

His alleged victim read out a lengthy victim impact statement ahead of his sentencing, where she claimed that Drake had groomed her from the age of 12 before sexually assaulting her in 2017, when she was 15 years old and he was 31. 

Brian Peck is no relation to Drake’s Drake & Josh costar, Josh Peck.

In 2004, Brian was sentenced to 16 months in prison after he pleaded no contest to two counts of child sex abuse against a then-unknown Nickelodeon star.

According to court documents, Brian was initially charged with 11 counts, including lewd act upon a child, sodomy of a person under 16, attempted sodomy of a person under 16, sexual penetration by a foreign object, four counts of oral copulation of a person under 16, oral copulation by anesthesia or controlled substance, sending harmful matter, and using a minor for sex acts. 

He pleaded “no contest” to lewd act against a child and oral copulation. The remaining counts were dismissed. 

Going back to the beginning, Drake explains in the episode that his mom and dad divorced when he was five, and going to auditions became his way of bonding with his father — who had no prior experience in the acting industry.

Joe fondly remembers: “Him and I just became so close. It was just natural, and he loved [acting].”

Drake got his big break when he landed a role in The Amanda Show when he was 13 years old, and while the first season was “great,” both he and his father remember things changing when Brian was hired as a dialogue coach for the second season. 

Brian was 40 years old at the time, and Drake was 14.

“I was told that Brian was a good coach and that he could really get Drake some jobs,” Joe recalls. “He worked with Leonardo DiCaprio, he worked with this person, that person, I was like, oh OK. Then he said: ‘You have to come to my house because that’s where I give the lessons.’”

“Everything seemed OK in the beginning, but I was always within eye distance,” he adds. 

“All the other parents would be seen and not heard,” he says. “I would never interrupt anything, but I very rarely sat in the green room. I’d always be on set somewhere where I could always keep my eyes on Drake.”

“Unfortunately, I started to see Brian just start to hang around Drake too much and it didn’t sit well with me. Drake would be in the dressing room or something, and in would pop Brian and just touch Drake, do things that… Wait a second, what are you doing? Drake can put that on himself,” Joe claims. “The thing is, this is in front of people. He’d maybe walk over to Drake and be feeding him some lines or whatever and put his arm around his waist. Put his hand up on his shoulder and kind of run it down his arm and things like that, and this would happen routinely.”

But when Joe aired his concerns to the production team at Nickelodeon, he was allegedly accused of being anti-gay.

“I went to production and said: ‘I really am uncomfortable with this guy, Brian Peck, always being around my son,’” he recalls. “I go: ‘I don’t see anything abnormal, but I don’t have a good feeling.’ And she goes: ‘Oh, well, I don’t know if you knew it or not, but he’s gay. Maybe you’re just homophobic, and you don’t understand he’s a touchy-feely guy?’ So I said: ‘OK,’ and it just kept not sitting well with me, so I told people on the set, and I was ostracized. So I backed off.”

“My dad started making it very difficult for Brian to be around me,” Drake says in the documentary. “I think Brian got a sense that my dad was on the watch, and he started to really drive a wedge between my dad and me. He started talking about how my dad’s stealing my money, nobody likes that my dad’s on set, he’s a real problem, so he just started making me believe that he was horrible for my career.”

“Coming from someone like Brian, I was believing it because he’d been in the business for so long, so he must know more than us,” he adds. 

Drake explains that he started to avoid his dad because he felt uncomfortable about not wanting him to be his manager anymore. Brian allegedly turned Drake’s mom against Joe, too, as he apparently hired an attorney to prove that Joe was not handling Drake’s money correctly.

“There was never any mishandling of any funds,” Drake clarifies. “But it was like an army against my dad.”

“I broke down and cried because I knew that was going to sever mine and my son’s relationship and that I wouldn’t be seeing him,” he continues. “And it wasn’t like he was five years old where I could say: ‘Give me my visitation,’ because Drake was old enough to make his own decision.”

After signing Drake’s bank account and other necessary paperwork over to his ex-wife, Joe claims: “I did say to her, and I said this to her in person: ‘You never, ever leave Drake alone with Brian Peck. And you never let him be around him unsupervised. Period. Whatsoever.’ And Brian just absolutely tricked her.”

Drake says that when his dad stopped being his manager, Brian ended up being the person who would take him to his auditions. As he and his mom lived in Orange County and most of the auditions were in Los Angeles, it allegedly became the norm for him to spend the night at Brian’s house after the auditions to avoid getting home late.

Drake was 15 years old at this point, and in the documentary he says that he was scared to say that he no longer wanted to spend nights at Brian’s house because he didn’t want his mom to ask questions.

“It just got worse and worse and worse and worse, and I was trapped, and I had no way out,” Drake alleges. “The abuse was extensive, and it got pretty brutal. I really don’t know how to elaborate on that on camera really. Why don’t you do this; why don’t you think of the worst stuff that someone can do to somebody as a sexual assault, and that will answer your question.”

When Drake got a girlfriend, her mom quickly picked up on the fact that something was wrong. She took Drake to see a therapist because she felt as though he was “in quite a bit of danger,” but he was initially too scared to say anything.

Drake alleges that Brian would warn him that if he said anything, he had the power to stop producers and directors from working with him in the future. Drake says: “It was me believing that I will never be able to do this ever again. I didn’t want to risk that. I was doing what I loved to do, and so I just kept it inside.”

But then Drake “exploded” while on the phone to his mom one day. He says: “I’ve no idea what provoked it, I have no idea what happened, but I just screamed into the phone everything that had been happening to me.”

Following Brian’s arrest, Drake recalls phoning his dad and asking: “Did you see they got him?” 

At this point, Joe had no idea that his son was the alleged victim in the case, saying in the episode: “Drake says they arrested him for molestation. I go: ‘You’re kidding, I knew it. I knew it!’”

“And my dad just goes: 'I am so glad that he was not able to get his hands on you,’” Drake adds before admitting that he couldn’t bring himself to tell him the truth. “I just couldn’t do it. So I just said: ‘Yeah, they got him,’ and he says: ‘Oh, I’m so glad. I knew he was going to do something to someone.’”

Joe’s emotional scenes in Quiet On Set struck a chord with viewers, who have taken to social media in the days since his episode aired to share their heartache for the situation.

“Drake's dad really broke my heart. He did everything he could to protect his son, and no one would listen to him,” one popular tweet reads.

Somebody else wrote: “The interviews with Drake’s dad hit me the hardest. You could hear it in his voice how heartbreaking this entire experience was for him, and how much he loves his son.”

Another viral tweet shows a screenshot of Joe in tears on the documentary with the caption: “This poor man omg. Just trying to protect his son from a predator.”

Opening up on The Sarah Fraser Show, Drake said that he’d been approached about going on the record with his allegations in the past but was unable to open up because he didn’t feel comfortable. 

But this time, Emma Schwartz — one of Quiet On Set’s directors — was able to put him at ease, and Drake decided that it’d be “cathartic” for his dad to be involved as well.

Drake explained: “Even though I was battling with, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I doing telling my story? Should I be doing this?’ [But I was getting this feeling of] ‘Wow, it's all out there now. I can get it off my chest.’ And I felt that would be cathartic and beneficial for my dad to be able to do.”