Boy Meets World's Danielle Fishel: A 'Creepy' TV Exec Said He Had My Teenage Calendar In His Bedroom

Danielle Fishel could've unfortunately headlined her own dark rendition of Girl Meets World far before a revival was ever in the cards.

During a recent episode of her rewatch podcast Pod Meets World (which she co-hosts with her former Boy Meets World costars Rider Strong and Will Friedle), the actress opened up about becoming "an object of desire at such a young age," recounting a story about a horrible experience she had with an adult TV executive while she was starring on the ABC sitcom.

"I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday [circled] on their calendar," said Fishel. "I had a male executive — I did a calendar [shoot] at 16 — and he specifically told me he had a certain calendar month in his bedroom."

The actress explained that while she was mature for her age, she now sees just how inappropriate the interaction was. At the time she was taken aback at first, but then thought otherwise "because 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."

She continued: "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."

Fishel said she didn't process how that kind of attention affected her until her late 30s, when she realized 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;" she didn't want anyone to think that she was "better than them."

She noted that it wasn't until the actual Girl Meets World series when she finally learned how to set up true boundaries for herself. "That was 37 years in the making," she said.