The Tale of Dirty Dan: Drake Bell, Episode 3
That Last Season That Really Didn't Need To Happen.
When we last tuned into the life and times of Drake Bell, it appeared, albeit briefly, that his fortunes were beginning to shift. After years of languishing in obscurity, surviving off a drip-feed of dubbing terrible animated films and the inexplicable generosity of the kind people of the United Mexican States1, and toiling in public scrutiny and controversy, mending bridges with former co-star Josh Peck from 2017 to 2019 brought him back to the headlines in a positive light rather than a negative one.
Then, 2020 happened.
Much like the rest of us, Drake Bell’s hopes for a fruitful and fulfilling year of prosperity would be shattered and his life would be dramatically up-ended in a way he could have never predicted. However, unlike the rest of us, grappling with the madness of the COVID fiasco and a world gone utterly mad would be the least of his worries.
This year would see the disintegration of Drake’s relationship with former co-star, Josh Peck. While I have my doubts that Josh ever truly desired to rekindle any kind of meaningful relationship with Drake outside of the occasional photo-shoot or reunion, the good will he engendered by buddying up with him and acting all chummy on YouTube and other social media platforms made headlines and spurred a lot of public interest. Whether he wanted to really hang out with Drake, or even cared all that much is very much up for debate. People thought it was, as the Redditors would say, epic wholesome chungus 100 or whatever to see the two hanging out, but, to me, it seems more like Josh Peck trotting Drake out like a little show-dog to wring some nostalgia bucks out of the old Drake and Josh fans.
I have this distinct feeling that they were, more than anything, using one another for different reasons. Perhaps I’m just cynical - and I am, but just put that aside for a moment - but if the two had legitimately made nice and buried what seems to be a rather one-sided grudge on Josh’s part, Josh would not have written a revival of Drake and Josh that seemed to be one elaborate, carefully calculated Fuck You to Drake, in which he would be not only the butt of the joke but, for all intents and purposes, the project would be written at his expense.
To be fair, the details of Josh’s fabled Josh and Drake sequel have only ever been disclosed by Drake and his then-wife, and only corroborated by unreliable and often anonymous third-parties on the internet, so, while I’m sure there’s some truth to it, it’s impossible to say how much short of someone leaking the entire script some time in the future.
But it wouldn’t be the fallout of the contentious reboot concept that would ultimately sour relations between the erstwhile co-workers once again.
In the last article, while speaking in regards to a host of easily-disproven and rather pernicious lies spun by Josh around the nature of his brief dalliance with Drake, I posed the question - Why would Josh lie? More importantly, why would he make such a series of astoundingly bold lies that fly in the face of evidence that is relatively easy to hunt down?
Well, the answer is rather simple - Drake got #Cancelled.
This is Melissa Lingafelt.
She and Drake dated between 2006 and 2009. Despite being the taller of the two - and looking a bit older, as well - she was sixteen, and Drake was twenty. In some sources I found, this is spun skeevy, which… I mean, maybe? I don’t really see it. Especially when you have Backhouse Mike dating someone of the same age at thirty. But I’ve also written on this topic before and, without diving too deep into it again, we’ll just say that is a twenty-year old guy dating a seventeen or sixteen year old unethical? No. Do I think it’s a good idea?
In August of 2020, over eleven years after splitting with Drake, Lingafelt would take to TikTok and post a video detailing allegations of abuse, both verbal and physical, that took place during their relationship. The video has since been deleted, but posted with the following caption:
I’ll be completely, perhaps unflatteringly honest with you, here - whenever I hear a line like This is my truth, the ears of my inner-skeptic immediately perk-up.
First and foremost, let me preface this next section with this; yes, heinous abuse of every kind runs rampant in Hollywood. Perhaps more than in most circles. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, I reckon that psychic abuse exists at this point and there are fuckers trying to beam negativity right into their partner’s heads just by staring at them really hard and thinking about how much they hate them.
It happens. We know this.
But we also know that, unfortunately, people in Hollywood also have this annoying little tendency to lie about being abused. A lot. And this has the very regrettable side-effect of making it difficult to parse out legitimate cases of domestic abuse from those that are highly exaggerated and, in some cases, outright fabricated. For instance, while following the meltdowns of several high-profile YouTuber’s careers, I’ve seen a lot of cases where their partner will leak the audio of a fight they had with said YouTuber and allege that the exchange contains verbal abuse and, when you listen to it… it’s just a couple having a regular, run-of-the-mill spat. More often than not when the full audio gets leaked, you hear that the individual accusing the other of abuse was saying some rather not-nice things themselves.
Hell, not to air my own dirty laundry, but if arguing was enough to constitute verbal abuse, both of my parents would be under the jail for the shit they said to one another during their most heated exchanges. Frankly, anyone who’s ever been in a relationship is most likely guilty of this kind of abuse, since I’ve never met one couple who’s been together for longer than the standard Honeymoon Phase that hasn’t lost their cool and said some choice words for their significant other at one time or another.
And, don’t mistake me - verbal abuse does exist. Very much so. But there’s a world of difference between getting frustrated and calling your girlfriend lazy because she can’t put away her own dishes and telling your girlfriend she’s fundamentally broken and unlovable filth that’s unworthy of breathing the same air as you and barely qualifies for the title of human.
Needless to say, in a world where giving someone a nasty look qualifies as abuse in some people’s opinions, and more so in a world where even the allegation of said abuse can utterly ruin someone’s reputation if not land them in jail, even without substantial evidence, I think it’s important to be critical of these claims not out of a place of dismissiveness for the alleged victim, but rather fair and objective assessment for the sake of both parties. If someone is legitimately abusive, believe me - I want to know so I can have nothing to do with them and, hopefully, they’ll suffer the necessary legal consequences. But it’s also necessary to see proof of wrongdoing before someone is written off entirely.
In Lingafelt’s case, she claims the following.
She also made the following allegation, which I would say is the most severe;
"At the pinnacle of it, he drug [sic] me down the stairs of our house on Los Feliz. My face hit every step on the way down. I have photos of this.”
If these pictures were shared, I can’t find them. I’m not saying they don’t exist - just that I couldn’t find them. Perhaps they were in the deleted video Lingafelt shared. I don’t know. And, if she did share them, I give her credit for being willing to do so, because posting pictures of yourself after being battered cannot be easy, and it would go a long way to validate her claims.
What’s less above board, in my opinion, is when Lingafelt began to share messages sent to her through social media by completely random users also alleging abuse by Drake Bell up to and including sexual assault against minors. The names of these victims were redacted, which, to be fair, is fine. I don’t fault anyone for wanting to remain anonymous when regaling stories of severe abuse. But at the same time, it makes it very difficult to take these accounts all that seriously as pieces of legitimate anecdotal evidence.
I really, really do not want to downplay the severity of these accusations, but in the absence of hard evidence or even identities for the most of the people making these claims… well, I just can’t say that they make for solid testimony.
It isn’t as if the denizens of the internet are exactly known for being thoroughly honest, and it’s entirely possible that someone could have just made a burner account to send Lingafelt a completely fictitious story about abuse from Drake Bell. Why? Because that’s just what people on the internet do. Some people just lie for the sake of lying. It’s like a sport, almost.
Let me make this clear in no uncertain terms - I am not saying that Drake Bell did not abuse Melissa Lingafelt. I am not saying that Melissa Lingafelt is lying. What I am saying is that, in these cases, and all cases, the most prudent view to take is that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. The legal structure of the United States - back when it functioned, at least to some degree - was structured that way for a reason. Blackstone’s Ratio, coined by English judge William Blackstone in his work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, stated, The law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer. And I tend to agree with that.
Drake, for his part, refuted these allegations with the following statement.
Who’s telling the truth? It’s impossible to say. There’s too much he said, she said to really parse it out. Ultimately, threats of legal action never went anywhere, and the whole thing unceremoniously fizzled out as bigger stories about bigger public figures committing bigger crimes eclipsed this blip on the Hollywood radar.
I’m not sure if Lingafelt’s testimony was what ultimately drove Josh to once again part ways with Drake Bell, but if it put a seed of doubt in his mind, that seed would germinate into a ghoulish bloom. While there was an attempt to #Cancel Drake Bell in light of these allegations, it wouldn’t be until 2021 that they would come to fruition when, at thirty-four years old, would be brought before a Cleveland court and plead guilty to a felony charge of attempted endangering children and a misdemeanor charge of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles.
Due to the ongoing COVID lockdowns, the proceedings were held over an online video call facilitated through the program Zoom (which I’m pretty sure has gone bankrupt and defunct once said quarantine procedures were lifted2).
Yes - the entire affair made it’s way onto the internet.
And yes - the internet did exactly what it usually does.
Given that it’s difficult to find a full, straight-forward account of the events that led up to the sentencing, I’ll give a general overview cobbled together from a variety of sources. From what I understand, Drake began online communications with a twelve year old fan via Twitter in 2014. Over the years, Drake would maintain this relationship, even going so far as to meet this minor in person while touring in the Ohio area and the greater Midwest. This minor’s name is unknown, despite appearing in person and on camera to deliver a victim impact statement to the court. By then, she was nineteen, which indicates that this relationship continued for well over seven years. The minor alleged that, when she turned fifteen, the conversations turned sexually explicit, and Drake began to send her lewd photographs through the internet. She claims that, as a fan with a long-standing relationship with him, she felt trapped and unable to simply walk away from the relationship. The two would meet multiple times over the years, but it was at a show in Toronto in December of 2017 that would serve as the breaking point. She reported the incident to Toronto police, who then turned the case over to the Cleveland police3, who, in turn, brought the charges on Drake after a three year investigation.
In the victim impact statement, the minor stated the following about Bell;
She alleged as well that she had spent over seven thousand dollars on therapy from the resulting trauma of their interactions, and regularly suffered panic attacks and insomnia.
Drake claimed to the court that, while he did exchange sexually explicit messages with the minor, that he was unaware of her age, ceased contact when he became so, and that, while he acted recklessly and inappropriately, he did not send her explicit photographic material. He also claims that, even after he ceased contact with the minor, she continued to seek out talking to and meeting with him.
When it was all said and done, Drake Bell was ultimately charged with a count of child endangerment and disseminating matter harmful to juveniles. Despite these being felony charges, he was given what many would consider to be a light sentence of two years probation and two hundred hours of community service, all of which he would be allowed to partake in his native state of California.
During the sentencing, the judge said the following to Bell.
Tyler Sinclair of the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office made the following statement after the trial conducted, which I believe carries a very pertinent line near the end.
"Numerous factors including strength of the evidence were weighed during our plea discussions with defense counsel. The victim was consulted throughout this process and approved of the final outcome."
But, before we discuss that, I want to the statement that Drake’s attorney made on Twitter following the trial’s conclusion.
"Today's plea and sentence reflect conduct for which Mr. Bell did accept responsibility. The victim's allegations that went beyond that which all parties agreed, not only lack supporting evidence but are contradicted by the facts learned through extensive investigation. As the court made clear, this plea was never about sexual misconduct or sexual relations with any person, let alone a minor. Sexual registration was not imposed as Mr. Bell did not plead guilty to any such offense.”
Drake himself said the following in an Instagram video, addressing the case.
And this is a true statement. So far as the law is concerned, Drake Bell is not a sex offender. In my opinion, he probably should be registered as one, given the fact that he exchanged sexual messages with a minor which, yeah - that’s pretty fucking bad - but, again, I must emphasis this - in the eyes of the law, he is not guilty of anything more severe than that.
We have the pieces - now let’s put them together.
The long and short of it all is that the nature of this case is greatly misunderstood by the public. This is most likely in no small part due to the rather fragmented and at times conflicting information laid out by the media. It is unclear to me, from the sources I found, whether it was the concert in Toronto or a meeting in a Cleveland hotel room while Drake was touring in the area that ultimately led the victim to finally go to the authorities. In one of these encounters, the minor claimed that Drake assaulted her. Both of these incidents were near the tail end of 2017. Regardless of which incident was the final straw for the victim doesn’t really matter. She accused Drake of sexual assault. I believe that’s what Drake’s attorney was referencing when he mentioned allegations that went beyond that which all parties agreed, not only lack[ing] supporting evidence but are contradicted by the facts learned through extensive investigation. Though I could find no explicit mention of this, I did find testimony that Drake was ordered by the Cleveland police to submit a DNA sample, which I can only imagine was done because a rape kit was administered to the victim the night of the alleged assault. Again, this piece of evidence must have been a non-starter, as otherwise, he would have been arraigned on charges of sexual assault and not child endangerment, as he was.
This is to say that, messy as the case and the coverage around it is, Drake was definitively and unquestionably not charged with sexually assaulting a minor. He was not charged with lewd conduct with a minor, either. In the eyes of the law, Drake did not touch or sexually engage with a minor.
In the eyes of the law.
I’ll put it as bluntly as I can - I don’t particularly trust either party here.
Given the severity of the language used by the minor in her victim impact statement, it seemed to me as if she was attempting to dig the knife into Drake as deep as she could. There is no small amount of vitriol in her words which could be spawned from any number of reasons too varied and vast to succinctly speculate on. There’s a great possibility Drake did exactly what she accused him of, and she would have every reason to detest him for it. There’s also the possibility that she felt slighted by Drake for some reason and set out to make him pay for it. There’s a million other potential causes and reasons that might have prompted her to give such a heated statement.
Drake, on the other hand, would have every incentive to lie to the court in order to save his own skin. Naturally, he would have done everything he possibly could have and said whatever he needed to say to avoid more severe charges.
I don’t want to be uncharitable to the victim because, again, I will explicitly state that I do not entirely trust Drake Bell’s testimony. At the same time, objectivity is of paramount importance in these kinds of cases.
And, with that in mind, I have to say that I don’t know what happened between Drake and this minor. Obviously. What happened in that hotel room in Cleveland or at the concert venue in Toronto is known definitively only to Drake and the minor. The rest of us will have nothing but their respective anecdotal evidence. The simple fact of the matter is that multiple police departments conducted an intensive investigation into the case for three solid years. Drake could have done something more severe than what he was ultimately charged for. Just because he wasn’t charged with sexual assault doesn’t mean he didn’t commit the act, but rather the prosecution wasn’t confident they could stick him with the charge, so, rather than risk the losing the entire case, they pursued charges that they could definitively find him guilty for. It’s a possibility that the minor wanted to press greater charges that the prosecutor team around her were unsure of pursuing. Seeking lesser charges for a guaranteed conviction in lieu of a more risky, more heavy charge suggested by the victim is is not uncommon practice in the American justice system.
Again - I don’t know.
But, whatever the case may be, even under the best and most charitable interpretation of events that assumes he was guilty only of the charges he plead guilty to… Drake is a faultless victim, here.
I have a very difficult time believing that he was unaware that the minor was… well, a minor. Going off of his own admission, he sent sexually explicit messages to a minor. Whether or not pictures were involved in almost tertiary. He was a thirty-plus year old man engaging in sexual talk with someone that he should have known damn well was underage. Did the minor give him false information and claim to be older in order to get close to him? It’s a possibility. She did claim to be one of his biggest fans in her impact statement. But the onus of responsibility was on Drake to find out the truth. And in that sense, he did act recklessly and foolishly. If he even suspected that this girl was underage - and, again, I may be uncharitable in saying this, but I can’t imagine the idea didn’t cross his mind at least once - he should have stayed far, far away from her. He should have never even messaged her, or any of his young fans, for that matter.
I’ll put it bluntly - no good was ever going to come of him privately contacting (or reciprocating contact if it was made with him) any of his fans. Especially young ones. To do so was to court disaster. That much seems to glaringly obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that it’s almost difficult to believe that anyone who would engage in such fragrantly reckless behavior wouldn’t have done it with ulterior motives. I usually dislike being so forward, but I feel as if the gravity of these accusations, allegations, and the actual, confirmed, legally prosecuted crime call for it; if Drake Bell willingly exchanged sexual messages with a minor, he’s a criminal. And an idiot. If he unwittingly exchanged sexual messages with a minor, he’s an first and foremost an idiot. And he’s still a criminal.
That’s really the end of the discussion.
Whatever the truth of the matter is, I’m not going to be the one to uncover it. Like I said - only two people in the world know what really happened, and I doubt we’ll ever be privy to the full and unbiased account from either of them.
As stated before, there is a lot of misinformation around this case. In the wake of these revelations, the common narrative was that Drake had sexually assaulted a minor. The salient point here is that, so far as the legal system of the United States is concerned, he did not. Now, this does not exonerate Drake Bell from what he did do with a minor. I am not defending Drake Bell’s actions. I am not calling him an ethical individual. Frankly, I would not trust him to be alone in a room with a female minor for an extended period of time. He did something deeply wrong. He should suffer the resulting consequences. But I think it’s important to not lose sight of what he did versus what people think he did.
In a way, Drake’s situation is very similar to that of his erstwhile boss and the ostensible star of this series of articles, Dan Schneider.
While it’s been said many times, many ways, that Schneider is hardly a faultless, blameless, maligned victim, the general public perception of the man is that he’s a sex offender. Needless to say, given the things that went on under his purview, and his own questionable behavior around his juvenile cast, it’s not difficult to understand why so many jump to that conclusion, or believe blatantly fallacious accounts of his conduct that would make him one. Again - those are the not-unwarranted consequences of his reckless and thoughtless behavior on the sets of his programs. But I think that what he did wrong is much more important than what people think he did wrong. And if too many people labor under the misapprehension that he did something that he quantifiably didn’t do, then one of two outcomes awaits - either a truly innocent man’s life is effectively over, or a guilty man’s criminal behavior is overlooked in favor of sensationalized fiction.
Again, I’m not saying that Schneider is not guilty of poor conduct. What I am saying - and I want to make this clear - is that it is of paramount importance that it be kept in mind that what people think he did was what others actually did. And aside from Brian Peck… have you ever heard of the others?
We’ll touch on this again near the end of the article, but, for now, I’ll conclude this section with a comparison to another famous case of Hollywood misconduct.
Harvey Weinstein is scum. That’s beyond question. In the intervening years since his conviction, several have been overturned. Perhaps this is rather unkind on my part, but given the stories that have come out about him, I believe that all his convictions could be overturned, and he would still be guilty of dozens of egregious and unethical actions.
But the most important thing to realize about Weinstein is that he did not act alone. He was far from the only powerful figure in Hollywood doing what he was accused of doing and very likely did. But he was the one who got punished for them all.
He was the scapegoat.
When he was convicted, all the oxygen in the #MeToo movement went with it. I have no doubt that Weinstein’s justly deserved conviction saved the hides of dozens, if not hundreds, of others in Hollywood that were equally guilty of doing the exact same things that put him behind bars. Given that the American media apparatus is part-and-parcel of the entertainment industry, and many high-ranking figures in one overlap into the other, I have little doubt that the talk of sexual misconduct in Hollywood in the post-Weinstein era going from a roar to muted background chatter is a coincidence.
This is all to say that Schneider, similarly, was cast out as the scapegoat for Nickelodeon Studios. Given that he did nothing legally wrong - at least, so far as we currently know - he couldn’t be relegated to a jail cell, but his exile from the industry and the subsequent death of his career pacified the braying mobs once calling for the total dissolution of Nickelodeon Studios. It completely shifted the focus away from those in the Studio who were actually committing crimes and left the public with a false sense of accomplishment that the big bad had been delivered their just rewards when, in reality, we still don’t know even a fraction of those in positions of power at Nickelodeon who either participated or enabled the crimes that occurred there.
I’m not saying that we, as members of the public and the audience to the great and lurid spectacle of this story, need to keep this in mind to exonerate characters like Schneider and Bell of their wrong-doings. Rather, I want to remind everyone that we need to be acutely aware of who did what, so that the true monsters in this story don’t slip back into the inky depths of obscurity.
In the aftermath of his conviction, Bell, his legal advisors, and public relations team were adamant to spin his guilty plea as a way of getting it over with.
In the aforementioned Instagram video, Drake said the following;
I’m sure this is partially true, as I’m certain that Drake was as eager to finish the proceedings more than anyone else involved in the case, but we’ve speculated enough on the matter.
More surprising, perhaps, Drake revealed in this video that he was married. And had a son. How exactly this knowledge escaped the public, I’m uncertain. Perhaps he was so irrelevant than anyone who did know just didn’t care. Maybe it was information he was very selective about letting out. Personally, I suspect it’s something of the former, as it’s been confirmed since that Drake and his wife were not unknown to Josh Peck and his wife, and the couples occasionally met one another after their brief period of reconciliation in 2017.
Drake’s wife was Janet von Schmeling. I already made this joke, but, really - she sounds like the daughter of some obscure Austrian baron that may or may not have overseen some dark and remote stretch of the Tyrolean Alps that may or may not have been suffering from a string of vampire attacks in a Gothic horror novel. Von Schmeling, however, is not German. Or Austrian. Or even Swiss. I’m sure there’s a few branches that recede back into the misty forests of Tuetonic lands on her family tree, but she is actually a citizen of the glorious South American nation of Paraguay.
It’s a lovely place. Or so I’m told by my friend who’s actually been there. Apparently, there’s a lot of folks of German stock down that way. I’m not sure why, but it probably has to do something with the stunning scenery. Or something like that.
I was going to make a joke that it’s the lesser of the two -Guays in South America, but, to be perfectly honest, I know precious little about Uruguay except that they’re kind of like a smaller Argentina, and even less about Paraguay except that, in the 1860’s, Brazil, Argentina, and the other -Guay decided, You know what, fuck that place in particular and triple-teamed it in a war that lead to half the country being divvied up between the winners and left anywhere between 60% to 90% of Paraguay’s population dead4.
Ouch.
It was also voted the world’s Happiest Country in 2017, so it seems like they’ve come a long way.
Von Schmeling is an actor on Paraguayan television. Apparently. I could find next to no information on her aside from the fact she was Drake’s boo thang5 since 2018. Together, they have a son named Jeremy. Here’s a picture of them at the House of Mouse, which probably gave Nickelodeon another reason to never want to do business with him again.
Like most good things in Drake’s life, this period of matrimony was to be lamentably brief and, ultimately, end in more pain than I think he could have anticipated.
In 2022 - only a year after going public with their relationship - von Schmeling and Drake would separate and, a year later, file for divorce. Von Schmeling cited the reliable old irreconcilable differences as the cause, and petitioned the court for custody of her son with visitation rights for Drake. Why did Drake want to split from her?
Well, I don’t think he did, because he actually found out that his wife was divorcing him when everyone else did. In a now deleted tweet, Drake said the following -
I won’t lie - I’m getting such a second-hand sting from that I actually felt a twinge of sympathy for the guy. Imagine logging on to Instagram to watch some silly short videos of forty-year olds poorly lip-syncing to soundbites from cartoons and you see some tabloid rag saying that you’re now divorced. That’s gotta be rough.
A dark and odious cloud of speculation gathered and hung low and heavy over the news of the sudden split. Many were pondering the question of whether or not the court case and felony charges laid at Drake’s feet were the reason his wife was leaving him, as would be expected.
Neither Drake nor his ex-wife have explicitly cited the legal drama and the resulting charges as the reason for their divorce. But, like… c’mon. Finding out your husband was chatting up a minor? Yeah, that might cause a handful of irreconcilable differences to crop up. I think if I found out my partner was doing something like that, they’d be lucky if all I did was slap them with divorce papers so hard that they’d loose some teeth. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Keep in mind that, according to Drake, they were married in 2018. He claims that they dated five years before that. The incident that put him before a judge vested with the almighty powers of the great and terrible State of Ohio occurred either in late 2017 or early 2018. This means that the chances that Drake was talking to this minor while also dating von Schmeling, if not marrying her, are only a few degrees north of nil.
But I don’t believe that was not the sole reason that the divorce was instigated. Oh, no. In the immediate aftermath of the legal charges, one might reasonably think that Bell would clean his act up and do everything he could to put on a good face for the public. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the way all of these little anecdotes that make up the life and times of a former teen sitcom star, that did not happen.
The divorce made headlines that Drake Bell was not accustomed to generating in the tabloids because he was also making headlines that he had no business making at the time. Mr. Bell was being quite the naughty boy. Tsk tsk. You can’t see it, but I’m currently shaking my head with a disapproving look and stroking one index finger with the other, as one does when expressing disappointment.
Only a week before news of the divorce rocked the peanut gallery, on April 13th, 2023, which is one of my favorite days because of, er… ah… um…
You know what? Not right now.
Point is, on that day - which was a Thursday, for whatever it’s worth - Drake Bell, while in Daytona Beach, Florida was reported as missing to the local police. Why was Drake, a born-and-bred son of California, in Florida? Well, according to his family, Drake liked to spend a lot of time in the Sunshine State. I mean, I get it. What’s not to love? Surf. Sun. Beautiful, bronze babes on sugar sand beaches, raving, meth-addicted lunatics pulling the most outlandish crimes in the land of the free, mouth-watering Cuban cuisine, and more gators than you could fry up for a trailer park cook-out. You can get all that in California without the oppressive humidity of Florida, sans the gators, but it also just so happened to be where van Schmeling relocated with Drake’s son after their separation, so, I don’t think that Bell was suckered there was any of the aforementioned draws. Oh, and he was also in Orlando the day before with his son at SeaWorld, so, yeah.
He was there to see his son. It’s amazing how many articles I had to sift through that said it was unknown why Drake was in Florida before I found this pertinent information with photographic evidence on TMZ. Love them or hate them - they report to a standard that’s better than pretty much anyone else out there. Which is probably why Drake was pretty damn sure his wife was actually divorcing him when he saw the news break on their site.
That night, the Daytona Beach Police Department issues a missing persons alert for Bell across different public media, stating that it was believed that he was endangered.
What was endangering Mr. Bell? That much was not specified. But it is worth noting that the police cited Bell’s last known whereabouts to be in the general vicinity of a Daytona Beach high school.
You know how I said I wouldn’t trust Drake alone with a minor? I don’t think I’m the only one.
Needless to say - it wasn’t a good look.
A day later, around one in the afternoon, the police issued a statement to the public informing that Drake Bell was alive and accounted for. Apparently, he just walked up to a cop and said, Yeah, man. Heard you were looking for me. I’m fine, bro. The police said that Drake was soft spoken and pleasant when he approached them.
Drake, in a now deleted tweet, offered this unsatisfying tidbit of information;
"You leave your phone in the car and don’t answer for the night and this?"
Now, I may be reading far too much into this, but I can’t imagine that his family would report him as missing to the cops for the simple happenstance of forgetting his phone in the car. I’ve called the cops to make a missing person’s report before - you don’t do it when you have reason to believe someone just left their phone lying around. Typically, you do it because the last time you saw the person in question, they were not in a good headspace, or perhaps they were saying worrying things, and then, without explanation - you can’t get a hold of them.
Fortunately, my experience ended in the same way as Drake’s, by which I mean the person my friends and I were concerned for turned up alive, unharmed, and petulantly angry that we had dared report them as missing when they were the ones who stormed off and disappeared for two days. Because, y’know - fuck your loved ones for being worried about you.
And I do believe that Drake’s family and friends had very valid reasons to be worried about his well-being. It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure up reasons as to why Drake might not have been in the best spot mentally at the time. As stated, his divorce was had already been in the works for almost a year at this point, and he’d been separated from his wife and most likely his son during most if not all of that time. He had two felonies under his belt. His career was effectively dead in the water.
Also, according to the intrepid reporters at TMZ, he also had been texting his family telling them he was going to hang himself. Now, I’ve never had anyone tell me that, per say, but I have to think that if someone ever did just casually let something like that slip in a text message, I’d probably call the police, too. Just a hunch.
Due to being checked in to a hotel room in Orlando the night of the event, the Orlando Police Department was drawn into the ordeal, and communications obtained by TMZ between officers revealed one telling another that they believed to be dealing with a possible suicide attempt and a celebrity who had a falling out with his wife.
Again - that was information that literally no other source provided, so, I feel as if I just pulled off solving a mystery. Call me Hercule Poirot the way I be putting these cases to bed.
Oh, and I should probably mention that this time coincided with his substance abuse issues running out of control. Remember how I said Josh Peck kicked his mind-altering substance habits after Drake and Josh wrapped? Well, Drake hadn’t. The guy had started to hit the bottle hard, and a lingering penchant for prescription pain killers leftover from the car wreck that nearly took his face off weren’t helping. A
A week after all of this hoopla happened, he was actually photographed huffing on a balloon, which, for those of you unaware - which, I hope would be most of you - is a common way of ingesting inhalants. Particularly nitrous oxide. You know the stuff that the dentist gives you to huff that makes you all giggly right before he rips your teeth out? That stuff.
This wasn’t even the first time Mr. Bell was seen sucking on a mysterious balloon in his car like it was the last breath he was ever going to take; he’d been spotted doing the exact same thing in December of 2022. That time, he’d even had his son in the car while he did it.
This might be a bit of a stretch on my part, but I have my doubts that Drake was sucking down some helium to do a funny high-pitched voice to amuse his three year old.
How this didn’t land him with another child endangerment charge is beyond me. It also seems as if this should have, in some way, been a pretty severe breach of his probation, but I suppose that California must be pretty lax about sucking down giggle gas with a child in the car, or he was able to talk his way out of it with the world’s most chill probation officer.
I said previously that Drake Bell must have felt as if 2020, what with the fallout of his incinerated relationship with Josh Peck, was his nadir. His low point. Rock bottom. It wasn’t - this was.
Overnight, Drake Bell had become a laughing stock. A pariah. His reputation? In tatters. His career? Well, it seemed like a bit of a stretch to think that any studio would be lining up to cash their chips in on a man with two felonies and a public perception for creeping on minors. I mean, they hire people who do worse literally all the time, but Drake didn’t possess the power, clout, or pull that those people leverage to keep their career afloat, and the scathingly critical eyes of the public were fixed firmly on him. Rightly or wrongly, Drake Bell is a Pedo memes were running rampant across social media, influencers and public figures were having a veritable field day dunking on him, and the entire internet was waiting for bated breath for him to do something else that they could laugh at him over or scorn him for. The knives were fucking out, and the public was practically slobbering all over themselves for a chance to use them.
Well, most of the public was. Drake, however, had one last refuge. A final redoubt. One last place where he could show his face, and one last group of people that wouldn’t immediately pounce on him like starving jackals the moment he stumbled.
Drake Bell still had Mexico.
Despite his rapidly waning credibility and all but depleted good will with the American public, Drake’s popularity in Mexico had inexplicably and miraculously managed to remain both intact and relatively unscathed south of the border.
Which brings us to 2024. Where is Drake now? How does Mexico fit into the picture? Have things gotten better for him?
Well, for the first time since this series began, I can finally, definitively say that, yes - yes they have.
Yet Drake’s journey back into the good graces of the American public would not be a comfortable one. But that’s something we’ll have to discuss… next time.
This is the official, legal name for Mexico, and for obvious reasons I think it isn’t used enough.
It hasn’t. But it should.
The minor in question was a Cleveland native.
These numbers are hotly debated and the odds that it was actually 90% of the population that perished do sound extremely… liberal, but, at the same time, everyone can agree that Paraguay suffered one of the worst and most thorough drubbings of any nation-state in a war since nation-states became a thing.
Has anyone else been hearing this song literally fucking everywhere recently? No? Just me?
Well, I mean I could think of another reason von Schmeling's family might be cagey about the ol' family history because you know, a German might end up in South America, for some reason, in 1946, just because...
When us children of the 90's and our younger siblings, cousins, and friends of the 00's were young, none of us considered the sort of insane roller coasters of stupidity and perversion were going on behind the scenes at Nickelodeon of all places. Just goes to show, you might think you know what's up, but chances are good you're not seeing what's really going on beneath the neatly polished public facing varnish.