When millennials think about the good old days of the Disney Channel, there are a number of shows and movies that come to mind. Disney Channel Original movies were at their peak. People smile when remembering movies like The Thirteenth Year, Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, and Smart House. Then there are shows like Lizzie McGuire, Even Stevens, and Boy Meets World. The late nineties and early 2000s were a great time to be a Disney fan and enjoy everything The Disney Channel had to offer.
One of the most popular Disney shows from that time was Boy Meets World. The show starred Ben Savage as Cory Matthews, Rider Strong as Shawn Hunter, and Danielle Fishel as Topanga Lawrence, three friends who must navigate life, family, and relationships while trying to survive middle school, high school, and college. Savage, Strong, and Fishel were all children when they were cast as the leads on the show. While many children who want to be actresses would be thrilled with their big break, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses for Fishel.
Fishel was just 12 years old when she was cast as Topanga Lawrence. She was a child playing a child, but that didn’t stop some much older men from sexualizing her. This caused her to have some very uncomfortable and dangerous experiences. On her recent podcast, Pod Meets World — which Fishel cohosts with Strong and Will Friedle — Lawrence opened up about some of her experiences.
At one point, an older man catfished Fishel, pretending to be a young girl, and correspond with Fishel for a while. The man then showed up at the young girl’s school and said that he was there to pick her up. Sadly, that wasn’t the only time that older men treated Fishel as though she was an adult woman. She even worked with some men who made incredibly inappropriate comments.
Fishel said:
“I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday [marked] on their calendar. I had a male executive — I did a calendar [photo shoot] at 16 — and he specifically told me he had a certain calendar month in his bedroom.”
However, because of her young age, Fishel admitted that she didn’t recognize the wildly inappropriate comment for what it was.
“We are peers, and this is how you relate to peers… I should not have been outwardly talked about at 14, 15, 16 years old. And I was, even directly to me.
As a kid, I always wanted to be older. I always wanted to be an adult. I wanted to be seen as an adult. So getting adult male attention as a teenage girl — 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.”
Boy Meets World ran from 1993 until 2000. Fishel and Savage then returned to the Disney family in 2014 when they reprised their roles as Cory and Topanga, a married couple raising their daughter. The show ran for three seasons, and Fishel admitted that it wasn’t until she returned to the new series that she learned to set boundaries and stand up for herself.
You can listen to Fishel’s story, as well as other stories from her time as a Disney star with Strong and their fellow costars, by listening to the Pod Meets World podcast. You can listen here.
