Ariana Grande is speaking out about her time on Nickelodeon after former child actors in the documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV claimed there was sexual harassment and a toxic workplace.
During her Podcrushed podcast, she reflected on her role as 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. “I’ve been reprocessing a lot of what the experience was like,” she continued around the 56-minute mark.
“I think that the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting, and I think there should be therapists,” she continued. “I think there should be parents allowed to be wherever they wanna be.”
“It’s really taken advantage of how much it means to the young performer to get a laugh,” Grande told her co-host. “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.”
Later in the interview, Ariana revealed that parents were rarely allowed on set, leaving young actors vulnerable to harassment.
“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.”
