Over the weekend, former Baywatch actress Nicole Eggert accused Scott Baio of having molested her, starting when she was 14.
As it turns out, Nicole had laid out her accusations for Dr. Oz, but Scott Baio"s team had managed to bury the episode, claiming that her story didn"t add up.
Nicole Eggert went on Megyn Kelly"s show to clear things up. You can watch that video below.
Scott Baio seems to enjoy arguing that Nicole Eggert"s timeline doesn"t add up, so she starts off. She"s pretty specific, too.
"We started filming the show in September of "86, when I was 14. And he immediately took to me and befriended me and earned my trust."
That"s normally a great thing for castmates. Normally.
"And then he started expressing his love for me … sorry, I"m emotional … and talking about marriage in the future."
That"s … creepy.
"And then I was still 14, before my 15th birthday. We were at his house, in his car, in his garage."
This is when she says that it got physical.
"And he reached over and he penetrated me with a finger."
It was, allegedly, just the beginning.
"And that is when the sexual touching and abuse started, after that."
Megyn Kelly then makes it clear that the age of consent in California is 18, and that it was, even back in the 1980s.
She later acknowledges that she knows that some people don"t care about that. And it"s true that some people find that particular law unjust (particularly when it impacts high school students dating each other).
But hopefully we can all agree that a 14 or 15 year old does not need to be engaging in anything sexual with someone over a decade their senior.
Megyn brings that up as a preface to asking, not whether Nicole "consented," but about how Nicole responded at the time.
As with any time that we"re talking about a teenager who was allegedly sexually abused by an adult, it"s a complicated topic.
"I was very young," Nicole Eggert describes. "And it was shocking, a little. I had never experienced anything like that before, either."
It sounds like she"s describing the very first alleged time, in that garage.
"So he was playing on not only my emotions but my hormones and all of those things."
It is not uncommon for survivors of sexual abuse to feel complicated emotions, including guilt, because some of what happens to them felt good at the time. Even victims much younger than 14 have experienced that, and it does not make anything okay.
She describes how she says that Scott pushed her to remain silent.
"And the issue with him is that he was our boss. And he also was telling me: "You can"t tell anybody. This is illegal, I"ll go to jail. The show will be over. Everybody will be sued. You"ll be out of a job. You"ll be ruining everybody"s life."
Even on top of the horrifying age gap, that sounds like a frightening power dynamic.
Megyn Kelly asks if it happened more than 10 times. Nicole Eggert says that it absolutely did.
"That happened quite often through the age of 16. … Probably once a week. And then, on set, there was a lot of groping, a lot of fondling, a lot of pulling me on his lap."
Creepy.
"You know, trying to sneak kisses in the back. Which other cast members saw."
Megyn Kelly acknowledges that one of Nicole Eggert"s former cast members confirmed that to her.
Nicole says that it mostly happened at Scott Baio"s house. But though she confided this situation to a few close friends at the time, she said that their reactions discouraged her from telling anyone else.
Finally, you know how Scott Baio says that her timeline doesn"t match up? He says that Nicole was 18 when they had sex.
Well, he cites Nicole"s own words for that. As you"ll see in this video below, Nicole explains that she had at the time not been ready to expose Scott for what he had allegedly done to her.
Which, she says, is why she just had a playful interview, and only after the interview was done did she mention upsetting things to the man who had interviewed her. Things that never made it to air.
Megyn Kelly shows a statement from Nik Richie, in which he confirms that Nicole Eggert was emotionally distressed after the interview and had confided that things had been worse than she had stated.
All of that and more is here in this clip. We don"t say this often, but Megyn Kelly did a pretty good job with this interview.
