Hi all, I recently wrote this essay and wanted to share portions of it. Essentially I've been thinking a lot about Dan Schneider, his role in spreading the wam kink, and his history of alleged abuses while working at Nickelodeon over the last quarter century. If you don't know his story, read on.

Trigger warnings for child abuse, workplace abuse, and pedophilia.

The metoo movement was objectively a positive step in empowering victims to fight back against abuse. It punished some of the most egregious offenders who were "open secrets" such as Weinstein and Cosby, and reignited discussion over what we can forgive or ignore if an artist is talented enough. However, it is ridiculous to think that all the famous abusers and "open secrets" were publically exposed and processed. David Bowie has been accused of having sex with underage teenagers on multiple occasions during the 70s and 80s. I love Bowie, and I can't imagine a world without his music, but he probably did that, and more than once. The accusations against Bowie came out during the metoo days, but never got popular. People love Bowie, and the accusations only really came out right after he died. It's not surprising he's more of an obscure metoo story, despite being a massive celebrity.

The metoo movement had its limits, and sadly, never won over the "final boss" of abusers, the serial rapist president Donald Trump. Sure he's out of power, but we replaced him with another accused serial rapist, albeit a Democrat with fewer accusations. We had an empowered movement to stop sexual assault gain ground, but never laid a glove on the serial abuser president of the country. That hurts.

The story of Dan Schneider is like Bowie in that accusations came to light, but there was never a public moment of reckoning. He's not a celebrity, but he's a powerful influential millionaire producer. The New York Times called him "The Norman Lear of children's television." Dan Schneider was a producer with Nickelodeon and Viacom from the early 90s through his forced exit in 2018. He was responsible for shows such as All That, Keenan and Kel, Drake and Josh, iCarly, and so on. You might have seen him cameo or in the background in any of those shows, he's a big fat guy. A conservative estimate would say that his shows and associated products made over 1 to 1.5 Billion in income for Nickelodeon and Viacom, he worked for a very long time there and was one of their biggest talents. As a result Dan is a multimillionaire. In 2018 he got the golden parachute from Viacom when accusations against him started piling up, the CEO was also fired in the fallout. We don't know for sure, but Dan probably got over 100 million to walk away from Nickelodeon and retire, or some amount near that.

The accusations and details of Dan's unusual sexual behaviors around children are as follows:
-Dan has been repeatedly accused of creating a hostile work environment for actors and staff since 1994. That never changed. Keep in mind, he works largely with children and child actors. He frequently verbally and emotionally abused children he worked with. This has been repeatedly documented at Viacom through his entire employment.
-Dan is very open about his foot fetish, and has posted at least a dozen videos of him playing with the feet of child actresses. This includes Victoria Justice and Ariana Grande, both of which were underage at the time the videos were shot and posted. He did this REPEATEDLY on his Twitter, it's very disturbing. He cleansed his Twitter of all questionable comments or videos in 2018 when he was forced out of Nickelodeon, but they're still out there.
-Dan has been accused of dating and having sex with Amanda Bynes when she was a child working at Nickelodeon.
-Dan produced many shows through the 2000s with child actors making sex jokes and innuendo, for shows aimed at children.
-Dans now cleaned Twitter had many many references to sexualizing child actors on his shows, or focusing on their feet in various ways.
-Dan has talked openly about punishing child actors he does not like in various ways on set. Often he would cover them in slime or water, and not let them clean or warm themselves for several hours. To my knowledge, nobody ever required medical attention due to this habit, but in any scenario that is completely inappropriate for a workplace.
-There are dozens of unverified "blind items" regarding additional accusations towards Dan Schneider. Some of these unverified accusations include victims like Lindsay Lohan and Brittney Spears, among others. It's likely untrue.
-Dan Schneider has also been involved for several years with Bryan Singer and his circle of friends. There's a lot out there about Bryan Singer.

The evidence makes it clear that there are at least questionable sexual behaviors with and around children going back 25 years, and also creating a toxic hellish work environment for adults and children at the same time. These behaviors were habitual, Viacom management were aware of complaints, and he continued to work for another two decades. His story "ended" when he got an obscene amount of money to retire. He won, metoo lost. Thousands of people were exposed to a toxic and damaging work environment in a best case scenario. In a worst case scenario, hundreds of children were groomed and dozens sexually assaulted over 25 years, while Viacom looked the other way because money talks. All those horrors in order to make iCarly...

It's an awful story. It's also a story that may have a personal connection to people on here. Dan's shows were not primarily focused on wam acts like shows from years earlier like YCDTOTV or WWYD, though he has spoken publically about being aroused by messy feet on multiple occasions. His shows did involve significant wam scenes, but it seemed to be less frequent than in earlier generations of nickelodeon programming.

Is he into wam? Unclear, but probably. Did he put TV on that influenced people here to get into wam? Almost definitely. Did he psychologically abuse and torture children on his shows? Yes, that is a fact, there were many complaints going back to 1994. Did he sexually abuse children while working at Nickelodeon? Maybe, you need to draw your own conclusions there.

Then... what does this all mean, now knowing this history? I guess you need to separate the origins of the kink with the pleasure engaging in it gives you today.

What I know for certain is that Nickelodeon circa 1995-2010 was a very unpleasant and abusive place to work. Everything else borders between "maybe" and "probably". The accusations came up then died down, and Dan is long gone. The story for all intents and purposes ended 3 years ago, but the effects of the trauma that happened there still linger for the victims.

Thanks for the note. Didn't know about this. Horrible.

Such bullshit excuse of Viacom re: "Money talks". They COULD have and SHOULD have fired his ass and given all his money instead to somebody else. The richer people are, CEOs, the DUMBER they are. They could just pick a random person off the street and shower THAT person with tons of free money and assert (in circular logic): See? THIS guy will make us RICH because obviously HE'S rich!

The NYT ran this article the other day.

It reads like it ran through legal; no real opinion offered.

Comments, please.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/arts/dan-schneider-nickelodeon.html

Couple additions/comments to your essay:

--Surprised you didn't mention one of the worst accusations against Schneider, which is that he is the father of Jamie Lynn Spears' child. (She had to leave the cast of whatever NICK show she was on when she got pregnant.) I guess this hasn't been fully confirmed, but it's a badly kept secret.

--A show more pivotal to most WAMmers, You Can't Do That On TV, had its own share of problems.... Roger Price was known to have some weird kinks which gets pretty bad when you're dealing with kids. Supposedly a WAM fetish, but also dressing up boys up in dresses frequently.... and the usual "bad work environment," which included porno mags on set (!!!) and the underage girls being spied on by their male cast members through peepholes (!!).
This is all discussed in a YouTube doc (which I obv can't link) and really focuses on the dress thing, which crops up in a LOT of Price's work (not just YCDTOTV). He was really into "humiliating" boys by making them wear a dress, or stripping down to their underwear, and.... Gross.

--Not to defend Bowie, but it's probably easier to compile a list of rock stars from the 70s who were NOT sleeping with underage girls. Most male rock stars had groupies every night. A good portion of groupies were underage. You can do the math. Bowie actually pales in comparison to, say, Jimmy Page (known for his love of 12-year-olds) and Ted Nugent (who at one point became the "legal guardian" of his 15-year-old girlfriend so he could bring her on tour with him).

You can still rake Bowie over the coals in your essay if you want to, but perhaps a broader context would help... i.e. a list of COUNTLESS other musicians who have also not been "MeToo"ed for their actions in the 1970s. Personally, I think Schneider's pattern of abuses over decades, from the 1990s into the 2000s, is far worse than Bowie occasionally having sex with an underage groupie--who most nights would have sex with a non-famous, but even older, road crew member--but that's just my take. Not excusing any behavior, regardless of the norms back then.

I've been wondering about the TV show 'The Jersey', there's one actress who gets repeatedly messed up in very creative ways. I think there's a very good chance that someone involved in the making of that show was a 'wammer'.

If so, where would this be on the ethical spectrum? The actress was an adult who had signed on a dotted line agreeing to shoot those scenes.

Now we know more why the NYT punted.