Ariana Grande has broken her silence on her time with Nickelodeon following the claims of sexual harassment and toxic workplace conditions made by former child actors in the documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, which streams on Max.
While talking with her “The Boy Is Mine” costar Penn Badgley, Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari on the trio’s Podcrushed podcast, the pop star reflected on playing Cat Valentine on the network’s Victorious and Sam & Cat when she was just a teenager. “Obviously my relationship to it has been — and is currently — changing,” she said in the Wednesday (June 12) episode. “I’ve been reprocessing a lot of what the experience was like.”
“I think that the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting, and I think there should be therapists,” continued Grande, who was cast on Victorious when she was just 14 years old. “I think there should be parents allowed to be wherever they wanna be.”
The interview comes about three months after the arrival of the docuseries, which explored multiple claims from former Nickelodeon employees about the network’s sets allegedly being rife with sexism, racism and inappropriate/predatory behavior involving underage stars and crew. The documentary also suggested that head producer Dan Schneider’s shows tended to put young women such as Grande in comedic situations with overt sexual implications. (Schneider filed a defamation lawsuit against Warner Bros. Discovery and the other companies behind the docuseries in May, arguing that Quiet on the Set incorrectly implied that he sexually abused the child performers he worked with.)
“It’s really taken advantage of how much it means to the young performer to get a laugh,” the “Yes, And?” artist told Badgley and his co-hosts. “We were convinced [that] was the cool thing about [Victorious]: We pushed the envelope with our humor, the innuendos. It just all happened so quickly, and now looking back on some of the clips, I’m like, ‘D–n, really?’”
“You think about it, ‘If I had a daughter …,’” she added. “There’s a bottom line. The things that weren’t approved for the network were snuck onto our website. That is another discovery. Going into it, I guess I’m upset.”
Grande also revealed that the Victorious casts’ parents were, for most of her time on the show, only occasionally allowed to be on set with their children. She also pointed out that young people in all industries, not just Hollywood, deal with inappropriate bosses and sexual harassment, and she’s glad that society is starting to push for better conditions.
“The survivors who have come forward, there’s not a word for how devastating that is to hear about,” she concluded. “I think the environment just needs to be made a lot safer all around. Like I said, I’m still, in real-time, reprocessing my relationship to it.”
Watch Grande recount her time on Nickelodeon on Podcrushed above.
