Christy Carlson Romano is opening up about her experience as a child star.
The 40-year-old Evan Stevens and Kim Possible alum spoke out on an upcoming episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast, via EW, about the recent Investigation Discovery Quiet on Set documentary about the allegations behind-the-scenes at Nickelodeon in the late ’90s and early ’00s.
“I’ve made a choice for several reasons to opt out of watching that imagery,” she said of the documentary, calling it “extremely triggering.”
She also said that she once turned down the network’s request for her to participate in a similar kind of documentary.
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“I’ve chosen not to speak about this with anybody, including ID, who originally came to me looking to see if I’d be interested in a doc like this. I don’t know if it was this doc. But I was approached when I first started advocating three years ago for my own YouTube channel with my own experiences that I did in different and separate episodes, so to speak. I started to be approached by many reality-show-type producers, and they were like, ‘Hey, how do we do this?’ and I would combat them with saying, ‘Hey, guys, the only way we would do this is if we talk about how do we fix it?’” she explained.
“[Fellow child actor] Alyson Stoner, who is a fantastic advocate in this space, has really impinged upon me the importance of understanding trauma p-rn. I actually have a degree from Columbia in film, and you know, we know that the art of montage and the collision of images is going to incite a certain kind of emotion. That is what documentary filmmaking in social movements is meant to do. And so we’re so manipulated by media, and we have so many little cut-downs of misinformation and things being thrown, that the echo chambers, to me, are not helpful,” she continued.
As a result, she said “there’s no hope being inserted into the narrative” by particpating in an Investigation Documentary, and didn’t sit right with her that the ones trying to make a documentary on this topic were “outsiders.”
“These are people who don’t belong to our community. These are outsiders. And maybe they, maybe if they knew where to put money towards [fixing] a problem, they would, but again, a lot of this has been perceived in a way that’s — it’s outside baseball. It’s not inside baseball, it’s outside baseball. These are trauma tourists.”
See some of the biggest revelations to come from the documentary.