This article mentions child sexual abuse. Please read with caution.
If you’ve been hearing news about Nickelodeon during the 1990s through the 2010s, it’s because there’s a troubling new documentary out that’s shocking everyone with how messed up it is. Investigation Discovery’s Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV has all kinds of alarming revelations about what some of the child stars had to endure.
One of the worst stories concerns production assistant Jason Handy, who used his access to little kids to exploit and abuse them, so where is he now?
Quiet on Set centers around Dan Schneider, the producer responsible for the lion’s share of the hit content from Nickelodeon during that time. Schneider created and oversaw Drake & Josh, The Amanda Show, and iCarly, among others. Schneider left in 2018 after 20 years of working with the network following the #metoo movement. The network did an investigation and found that while there was no evidence of sexual misconduct from Schneider, he was verbally abusive toward the actors and his staff. He denied the allegations.
The doc has several other troubling allegations, including how there were only two women writers on The Amanda Show and how one of them was forced to simulate sodomy in the middle of a writers’ room, and both of them had to split a salary. One of the worst things that happened involved now-convicted child sexual abuser and then dialogue coach Brian Peck, who performed a sex act on Drake Bell and repeatedly abused him. Another terrible tale involved Jason Handy.
Who was Nickelodeon production assistant Jason Handy?
Jason Handy always wanted to work in Hollywood. He moved from the cornfields of Nebraska to the rolling California hills in pursuit of a showbiz dream. He didn’t do too bad for himself, finding a job with a reputable television studio as a production assistant when he was still in his mid-20s. In addition to his work at Nickelodeon, Handy volunteered at a church in Malibu for children 6 and under. Basically, he had constant contact with children seven days a week.
When he worked on set at Nickelodeon, his main job was to escort the children around while ensuring the parents kept their distance so the showrunners could do their jobs without interference. He was described as charismatic and would chat with parents during the breaks, gaining their trust. By doing this, he could con his way into keeping in touch with the kids after they left the set, keeping them on the line under the guise of “future opportunities.”
This is what happened to 11-year-old Brandi. Brandi had a small part on The Amanda Show and her mom was pretty pumped that her daughter made a “friend” in the industry, thinking that maybe it could lead to more work. So when Handy started emailing Brandi, she didn’t think much of it. It felt innocent. That is, until one particular photograph changed everything. According to her mother, Brandi suddenly shut her computer and ran into her mom’s bedroom. She started crying and, well here’s how Brandi’s mom tells it on the show: “I said, ‘Brandi, what is wrong?’ She started to cry and she said, ‘I got an email from Jason.’ It was a picture of him naked, masturbating.”
In the email, Handy said he just wanted Brandi to know he was thinking about her. While mom could have gone immediately to the police, she decided she didn’t want her daughter to be further traumatized, so she simply pulled her out of the entertainment industry. Things got worse for Handy in 2003, when police in Michigan tipped off the LAPD’s Sexually Exploited Child Unit that Handy had inappropriate images of children at his home in Sherman Oaks.
Handy allegedly hooked a teenage girl with promises that he could provide her with a TV career. He flew to Michigan to meet her at her middle school and he did “inappropriate” things to her, before asking her to come to his hotel room. When the LAPD investigated his home following the tip, they found more than 1,700 pictures of kids and seven explicit videos. They also found ziplock bags with “tokens” from different little girls. In one bag, police found all of Brandi’s letters.
Police also found a diary where Handy referred to himself as a full-blown “pedophile” who couldn’t control his “desire for little girls.” Another entry said “I even struggle on a day-to-day basis of how I can find a victim to rape if I have to.” It would come out later in court that he assaulted a young girl from the show Cousin Skeeter when he forcefully kissed her in her home while they were playing video games and then told her not to tell her mother. He also had 1,000 photos of young girls he took from the elementary school across the street where he lived.
He pleaded no contest in 2004 to distributing sexually explicit material by email, lewd acts on a child, and sexual exploitation of children. He was given six years in prison. When he got out, he moved to North Carolina and registered as a sex offender. There’s been a lot of anger and confusion on the internet over Handy’s relatively light sentence, considering his crimes.
“Authorities found 10,000 child porn photos that belonged to Jason Handy, evidence of him SA two kids, and a confession from him admitting to being a pedophile and he only got 6 years in jail. I AM DONE #QuietOnSet,” one person said.
Where is Jason Handy now?
Things were quiet for Handy until 2014, when he was arrested from his house in Guilford County on Oct. 7. He was charged with three counts of indecent liberties with a child and an additional two counts of sex offender registry violations. He was held on a $1 million bail. He was convicted again, but this time it was federally. Currently, Handy is in the low to medium-security Federal Correctional Institution Petersburg Medium in Hopewell, Virginia. His release date is currently listed as Aug. 28, 2038.
If you know someone suffering from sexual violence, contact RAINN or the National Sexual Abuse Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.