Danielle Fishel now realizes how inappropriate some of the comments that were made to her during her teenage years were.
During a recent episode of her podcast Pod Meets World with cohosts and former Boy Meets World costars Rider Strong and Will Friedle, Fishel talked about becoming “an object of desire at such a young age.”
Fishel played Topanga Lawrence for seven seasons on the ABC show Boy Meets World, starting at age 12 in 1993, with the show ending in 2000. She later reprised the Topanga role as an adult for its Disney Channel spin-off, Girl Meets World, from 2014 to 2017.
She used to believe that she was engaging in peer-to-peer interactions back in the day.
“As a kid, I always wanted to be older. I always wanted to be an adult. I wanted to be seen as an adult,” Fishel said. “So getting adult male attention as a teenage girl felt like — I didn’t think of it as being creepy or weird. I felt like it was validation that I was mature and I was an adult and I was capable and that they were seeing me the way I was, not for the number on a page. And in hindsight, that is absolutely wrong.”
Now, at 43, Fishel realizes ” I should not have been outwardly talked about at 14, 15, 16 years old. And I was, even directly to me.”
She continued, “I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday on their calendar. “I had a male executive — I did a calendar at 16 — and he specifically told me he had a certain calendar month in his bedroom.”
Even that salacious remark didn’t phase her, “because we are peers, and this is how you relate to peers.’”
Finally, at age 37, the lights went on.
She realized after a series of failed relationships that she was “bad at boundaries” and had “absolutely no expectations of how you’re supposed to talk to me, of how you’re supposed to treat me.”
It was only while filming the spin-off show Girl Meets World that she finally figured things out.
“That was 37 years in the making,” she said.
