Former Nickelodeon child star Jennette McCurdy is once again pulling back the curtain on the darker realities of child stardom—this time detailing what she now calls a “creepy,” emotionally addictive relationship with a much older man she met while working on the set of iCarly.
In a candid interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast this week, McCurdy, now 33, described a relationship she entered as a teenager—around 17 or 18 years old—with a man in his mid-30s.
The interview arrives just days before the release of her upcoming memoir, Half His Age, on Jan. 13, which expands on the experience and its long-term emotional impact.
Looking back, McCurdy said she now recognizes that the relationship left her feeling angry.
“I didn’t realize how angry I still was,” she told podcast host Alex Cooper. “I didn’t think of this person ever that I was in a relationship with at all. He wasn’t on my mind. Then I’m writing this book … because I have so much anger, so much left to process.”
McCurdy said the relationship began with the two spending time in the show’s writers’ room, where the older man would show her films like Dazed and Confused. Though she said the movies weren’t of interest to her at the time, she pretended to enjoy them to maintain the connection.
At the same time, McCurdy was juggling the rigid demands of being a working minor: long shooting days, school requirements, and a schedule she said, left her squeezing the relationship into “half-hour pockets of time,” often dictated by the older man.
“I had to be at his every beck and call,” she told Cooper. “When he calls, I go. … It was just exhausting.”
McCurdy described the relationship as defined by a “nuanced power dynamic” where she was pressured into physical intimacy she wasn’t ready for—particularly given her Mormon upbringing and her intention to abstain from sex before marriage.
She recalled one incident in which the man, whom she described as “completely drunk,” pressured her into oral sex—something she said she didn’t even understand at the time.
“‘That sounds kind of weird,’” she recalled telling him. “‘I’m nervous to do this.’”
She said he dismissed her hesitation, responding that he would “guide” her through it. McCurdy described the experience as both “difficult” and “uncomfortable.”
The pressure didn’t stop there. She recalled moments where the man framed his desires as unavoidable, telling her, “It was very, ‘I’m a mid-30s man, and this is something I need. I’m respectful of your boundary that you can’t have sex before marriage, but I also have needs of my own.’”
McCurdy told Cooper, “I eventually did have sex with him. I disregarded my self-imposed rule of no sex before marriage.”
In hindsight, she described the relationship as emotionally addictive, likening it to a cycle of anticipation and crash. “My nervous system is hijacked,” she said, explaining that the highs and lows kept her tethered to him.
At the same time, McCurdy was living under the control of her mother, Debra McCurdy, whose behavior she previously detailed in her bestselling memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died. In that book and subsequent interviews, McCurdy described years of emotional and physical abuse, including strict control over her body, finances, and personal life.
The relationship with the older man ended shortly after her mother’s death in 2013, following a 17-year battle with breast cancer. McCurdy has said that loss forced her into a reckoning with both her upbringing and the relationships she had normalized as a result of it.
While she has said her mother left her “with a lot of s—t to parse through,” McCurdy has also spoken about reaching a place where she can feel grief without guilt.
“I’m able to just miss her sometimes,” she said, adding that writing has been a key tool in processing past trauma.
McCurdy’s revelations arrive after a broader reckoning over how Nickelodeon treated its child performers—one reignited by the 2024 bombshell docuseries Quiet on Set.
The five-part investigation detailed allegations of misconduct and unsafe working conditions across multiple productions, including shows overseen by iCarly producer Dan Schneider.
