Several Quiet On Set subjects speak out against "retraumatizing" doc
Former Nickelodeon stars Raquel Lee Bolleau and Alexa Nikolas say the documentary was "not at all what [they] signed up for"
Re-airing any sort of exploitative or sexually explicit material—even for the purpose of exposing a predatory system—is a slippery slope, and it’s one Quiet On Set subjects Raquel Lee Bolleau and Alexa Nikolas say the documentary’s producers didn’t handle well. “After watching the show, I saw that it was not at all what I signed up for,” Lee Bolleau, who had recounted her traumatic time on The Amanda Show and subsequent passion for protecting other young performers for the documentary, told IndieWire. “I also saw that I was surrounded by people who have one agenda, and that one agenda is their own success. It’s a horrible word to even use in this context: success.”
When it released its first four episodes last month, Quiet On Set instigated a massive wave of conversation about the abhorrent behavior of former Nickelodeon producer Dan Schneider and the ethics of child stardom in general. But Lee Bolleau and Nikolas (who appeared on Zoey 101 before pivoting to full-time activism), accuse the series’ co-creators, Emma Schwartz and Mary Robertson, of using their stories as an excuse to re-air inappropriate material from the shows they starred in as kids, effectively exploiting them all over again.
“They made me feel like my story was going to be heard and it wasn’t,” Nikolas said. “They were more interested in resurfacing that awful footage than listening to survivors’ experiences.” (For what it’s worth, Nikolas and her organization, Eat Predators, have also been accused of mishandling survivors’ stories.)
In hindsight of the series’ premiere, Lee Bolleau and Nikolas have also come to see the documentary’s two-year production window as an intentional “siloing” of its subjects that kept them in the dark about the documentary’s overall structure and “manufactured consent” that made it harder to critique the project. “They pieced together a story and a narrative that they had on their own,” Lee Bolleau said. “The reason they kept us all apart and from knowing specifics was because they knew if we all got together, we would start sharing and exchanging experiences and figuring out what this really is and what it means for us.”