Ariana Grande breaks silence on her experience at Nickelodeon amid recent allegations against Dan Schneider

In a recent podcast interview with Penn Badgley, Ariana Grande reflected on her time working on the sets of Victorious and Sam & Cat. On the latter’s Podcrushed show, the singer said she wished the Nickelodeon sets were made safer for child actors. This comes after Dan Schneider, the creator of the aforementioned children’s show, was accused of s*xually abusing child actors.

During her Podcrushed interview, Ariana Grande revealed that she was initially extremely excited to audition for Victorious alongside Liz Gillies. However, when she now looks back on the show, she has been “reprocessing a lot of what the experience was like.”

Ariana Grande did not mention Dan Schneider specifically throughout the interview. Nonetheless, several child actors have seemingly referred to him whenever they have spoken about their experience on the Nickelodeon series.

While speaking to Penn Badgley, Grande said she wishes therapists were available for the youngsters on the set. She also recalled that parents were often not allowed to be on Nickelodeon sets.

“I think parents should allowed to be wherever they want to be, and I think not only on kids’ sets. I think if anyone wants to do this, or music, or anything at this level of exposure, there should be in the contract something about therapy is mandatory twice a week or thrice a week, or something like that,” she said.

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Ariana Grande addresses double entendres included in Victorious

Ariana Grande played Cat Valentine in Victorious. Actor Daniella Monet, who played Trina Vega on the Nickelodeon show, was one of the many who expressed concern over the s*xual nature of certain scenes in the show. In a 2022 interview with Insider, she revealed that certain outfits seen on the show were “not age-appropriate.”

Daniella also mentioned that there were certain scenes, like one including her eating a pickle and applying lip gloss, which she opined was too s*xual to be included in the show.

Speaking about such instances, Ariana Grande said that she initially believed that it was “cool” to include such scenes and that they had “pushed the envelope with our humor.”

“I don’t know, I think it just all happened so quickly and now looking back on some of the clips I’m like, ‘Damn, really? Oh s**t.’ And the things that weren’t approved for the network were snuck on to like our website or whatever or was. And that is another discovery. I guess I’m upset yeah,” she said.

Ariana Grande’s interview with Badgley comes after Investigation Discovery created the Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV docuseries, where they detailed the abuse that allegedly took place at the hands of Schneider.

In the series, former writers, actors, and crew members alleged that Schneider-produced series like Zoey 101, The Amanda Show, and All That, among others, were created on sets where s*xual abuse, harassment, racial discrimination, and toxic work environments were prominent.

In response, Schneider sued the makers of Quiet on Set, alleging that the series wrongly implied that he s*xually abused the child actors he worked with.