Boy Meets World star Danielle Fishel has revealed that she was catfished by an adult man posing as a young female fan when she was a child.
Fishel starred in all seven seasons of the US coming-of-age sitcom between 1993 and 2000, playing Ben Savage’s character Cory’s love interest Topanga.
In a recent episode of the Pod Meets World podcast, Fishel recalled: “When we first started getting fan mail, I also read them all and responded to them all.
“I got a letter in ’93 from a young girl and she included pictures of herself in it, and she was in gymnastics.” Fishel would have been 12 years old at the time.
“She wrote me this handwritten letter that she was a fan, and I wrote her back and she sent me another letter and we started this correspondence back and forth. I felt very close to her, and one of the things she talked about regularly was that both of her parents died when she was young and she lived with her older brother,” she continued.
Fishel said that one of the letters included what the girl said was her phone number, however, when she called it, it would go straight to her brother’s voicemail and that no one ever called her back.
Eventually, Fishel said her mum realised her pen pal was, in fact, an adult man after they “got a letter from [the real girl’s] brother saying that she had died”.
Things then turned predatory when the man turned up at her school, “telling people he was there to pick me up”.
Fishel’s story was cut short on the podcast, meaning it remains unclear what became of the man and whether he faced criminal charges.
Her former co-star Rider Strong, who played Shawn Hunter, admitted that he would “meet up with” female fans of the show who had contacted him to play video games.
“You just have to create boundaries. It’s so hard,” he said.
