By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago
Less than a month ahead of the Stranger Things Season 5 debut, the most unexpected scandal erupted: a report that Millie Bobby Brown had filed a harassment and bullying claim against castmate David Harbour. Recently, the two actors appeared together on the red carpet for the premiere of the latest season, and Brown gave a statement about how “we value our friendship more than anything.”
This has been reported by several outlets as a denial of the alleged harassment report, but here’s the thing: literally nothing Brown said serves as a firm denial of this show’s biggest scandal.
A United Front
The most recent wrinkle in this ongoing drama is when The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Brown a few days after her red carpet appearance, and the outlet asked why it was so important for these two Stranger Things icons to present themselves as a unified front after the explosive report about Harbour bullying her. “We’ve been doing that for the last 10 years,” she said before clarifying that “I mean, we have always been united in that. We love this show with everything, and we value our friendship more than anything.”
To their credit, The Hollywood Reporter was blunt in its assessment of Mille Bobby Brown’s words: that what she said did not directly refute the alleged report that David Harbour had bullied and harassed her on set. Originally, the Daily Mail alleged that Brown’s report contained many pages of allegations, which resulted in months of investigations by Netflix. According to this report, this resulted in Brown being allegedly accompanied by a personal representative on set while shooting Season 5.
When Is A Denial Not A Denial?
She may not have directly refuted these allegations, but countless Stranger Things fans believe her brief statement and sharing the red carpet with Harbour means the two have buried the hatchet. On top of that, several prominent media outlets have used this red carpet encounter to claim (or at least, imply) that Stranger Things has managed to sweep its biggest scandal under the rug. However, Brown denied nothing, merely noting that the cast has always presented as a unified front and that they care about the show and their collective friendship.
Ironically enough, Stranger Things showrunners, the Duffer Brothers, made things worse a few days previously when The Hollywood Reporter asked them about the bullying and harassment allegations at the show’s red carpet premiere. “Obviously, you understand I can’t get into personal on-set matters, but I will say we’ve been doing this for 10 years with this cast, and at this point they’re family, and we deeply care about them,” Matt Duffer said. “Nothing matters more than just having a set where everyone feels safe and happy.”
Again, this isn’t exactly a denial of the bullying and harassment report. Furthermore, “I can’t get into personal on-set matters” may imply there are such matters that they have to stay hush-hush about. If that’s not enough to make you suspicious, director and executive producer Shawn Levy seemingly implied that some reports about this scandal were closer to the truth than the Duffer Brothers would like to admit.
The Man Who (Almost) Said Too Much
“I’ve read a bunch of stories, and they range from wildly inaccurate to,” he said, trailing off before saying, “there’s so much noise around it.” He went on to make a fairly generic statement about the cast being like family, but before that, it sounded like he was going to say that some of the stories were very different from “wildly inaccurate.” At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, the opposite of “wildly inaccurate” would be “wildly accurate,” implying that some of these unnamed news stories were correct in their reporting of this scandal.
I have no inside information about David Harbour allegedly bullying and harassing Millie Bobby Brown, and we probably won’t get any concrete information about the matter until Season 5 of Stranger Things is well in everybody’s rearview mirror. Still, I can’t help but get annoyed by both fans and outlets who are acting like Brown’s fairly generic, PR-friendly statement amounts to a denial of any wrongdoing. Vecna isn’t to blame, but it seems like basic media literacy among most Stranger Things fans is a bit like Eddie Munson: dead and never coming back.
