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‘Boy Meets World' alum Danielle Fishel has opened up about the sexualization she faced as a teenager on the hit show. Fishel said a “creepy” executive was assigned to the show that allegedly had photos of her in his bedroom.
“I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday on their calendar,” she told her Pod Meets World co-hosts and former ‘Boy Meets World' costars Rider Strong and Will Friedle. “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.”
Fishel explained that after she was told that she justified it by thinking: ‘Yes, because we are peers, and this is how you relate to peers.'”
“As a kid, I always wanted to be older,” she later admitted. “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.”
She added, “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 noted that she was mature for her age but was able to come to a realization about the wrongdoing of the executive later on.
“I’ve always been able to hold a conversation with an adult. I can look you in the eye. I’ve always been those things,” she explained. “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.”
“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.”
Boy Meets World can be streamed on Disney+.
