True crime documentaries dominate streaming services. At best, they highlight the stories of survivors in impactful ways. At worst, they exploit the pain of vulnerable people. The recent release of one wildly popular docuseries pushes us to consider if the media we consume is only further replicating harm.
HBO’s Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV revealed the extent of child abuse and exploitation behind Nickelodeon productions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the weeks since the docuseries’ March release, survivors have come forward to say they felt lied to and exploited by the producers behind the project.
According to survivors Raquel Lee Bolleau and Alexa Nikolas, who starred on The Amanda Show and Zoey 101, respectively, producers said they wanted to take an honest look at the abuse they endured, but in the end the documentary only reproduced the exploitation they experienced while also keeping them in the dark about the central narrative of the documentary.
Both Lee Bolleau and Nikolas allege producers did not make them aware that the horrific abuse suffered by Drake Bell at the hands of Brian Peck would be the series’ central focus. Lee Bolleau said producers tried to project the allegations against Peck onto her, instead of listening to her experiences as a survivor. At one point, according to the survivors, Lee Bolleau actually intervened mid-interview to ask producers why the questions they asked didn’t align with what had previously been agreed upon for the docuseries.
“They made me feel like my story was going to be heard and it wasn’t,” Nikolas told IndieWire, pointing out that the docuseries decontextualized and repeatedly used a sexualized clip of her as a child. “They were more interested in resurfacing that awful footage than listening to survivors’ experiences.”
Quiet on Set premiered to 20 million viewers. While the series may have changed the population’s view of Nickelodeon productions and the company’s treatment of child actors, the docuseries clearly was not made with a trauma-informed approach to journalism. Producers did not take a collaborative approach to the production of the series, which was filled with sexualized images of child actors, presumably without survivors’ consent. This approach merely reproduced the very violence the docuseries sought to expose and condemn, thus further exploiting the pain and trauma of survivors.
This has been somewhat of a trend since at least October 2017 when the sexual crimes of Harvey Weinstein were exposed in investigations by The New York Times and The New Yorker. But what happens when the journalists, producers, and other media-makers who set out to expose sexual abuse and other crimes aren’t properly trained to handle reporting on traumatic subjects?
The first reports about Weinstein’s crimes set new standards for reporting on sexual violence in Hollywood and beyond, thanks in large part to the rigorous reporting that included third-party confirmation of events and physical documentation in the form of evidence of the producer’s hotel stays and nondisclosure agreements signed by survivors. However, many ‘Me Too’ reporting attempts that followed were sensationalized or otherwise carried sexist and victim-blaming elements.
A famous example of this is news site Babe.net’s anonymous report on a sexual misconduct allegation against actor Aziz Ansari published in 2018. The story focused on salacious details, like what the victim was wearing, rather than gathering corroborating evidence. Babe also rushed to publish the article as a way of driving engagement to their website instead of working to gather substantial evidence that could have protected the victim from backlash. At the time, Babe’s reporting was widely criticized on social media by journalists, but media seems to have learned very little from the debacle.
Quiet On Set suffers from the same kind of misunderstanding of what sexual abuse is and how it should be handled. Unfortunately, the narrative construction in the docuseries sensationalizes survivors’ stories for public consumption rather than giving them space to speak up. By using Bell’s abuse as a big reveal for the audience, the docuseries sacrifices the ability to explore the subject of sexual violence as a systemic issue. In the fallout of the show, many viewers have pointed out that Bell has also been accused of sexual violence against a minor. But the docuseries wanted to make Bell the star of the story, so very little was said about this essential and complex information. The docuseries did provide important context around Nickelodeon productions to the public eye, but ultimately producers seemed to prioritize shocking the audience.
As a journalist and a scholar who has studied the impact of sexual violence reporting in Hollywood and beyond, I strongly believe that reporting on traumatic events requires journalists to turn everything they have learned about reporting inside out and upside down. Survivors of sexual violence—or any traumatic event—are not regular sources you can bait and switch to get the information you need for a story. Treating survivor sources this way risks re-traumatizing them or puts them at risk of legal, mental, or physical backlash from their abusers.
It’s important to see survivors as collaborators rather than sources to excavate and exploit for a check. Consent must also be at the forefront of journalists’ minds when writing these kinds of stories. While we, as reporters, may be the conduits for survivors’ stories, it’s essential to remember that these stories don’t belong to us and that protecting survivors’ autonomy is more important than publishing the story.
The first thing survivors of sexual violence lose when they go through sexual assault and abuse is control over their own bodies and lives. When a survivor tells their story, they are attempting to regain control and assert their autonomy. Journalists can be wonderful allies in that endeavor—if we understand that this effort should be led by the survivors themselves and not geared by our desire for readers, viewers, or clicks.
When survivors of any industry are willing to tell their stories, it should be understood as an invitation to rethink and remake reporting practices to accommodate their needs and their direction, without abandoning journalist integrity. As journalists, we must reckon with the ways our profession has historically exploited trauma and pain for engagement, fame, and money—and we must go against the grain of this harm. We must develop trauma-informed methodologies that are honest, collaborative, and that ultimately have the objective of helping survivors tell their stories rather than making money or driving engagement by using their stories in narratives we construct.
If we continue on the same path, we risk journalism becoming another industry that capitalizes on systemic sexual abuse and harassment.
