Todd Bridges, the star of the 1970s US comedy Diff’rent Strokes, said that his publicist molested him and that abuse has devastated countless lives in Hollywood.

“I’m one of the few children who’s still around. Pretty much every one of my protégés have died or committed suicide or OD’d, you know, because they couldn’t get over the stuff that happened to them,” he said.

“At the time that it was going on, 11 to 12, I didn’t know what I was. As a little kid you don’t know what you are, I’d never had sexual encounters or anything and when that man did it to me, he’d groomed me very well.”

Todd Bridges recalls ‘extreme racism’ growing up even as a TV teen idol

Todd Bridges was singled out for his darker skin despite his early success. Decades after achieving fame, the actor who played Willis Jackson on the NBC comedy became honest about experiencing “extreme racism” as a child star, calling it the “most difficult” aspect of growing up.

Bridges, 55, told Page Six, “Here you are doing something spectacular for people and people are enjoying it, but then you go outside and you’re treated like you’re ignorant, dumb and stupid.”

“Not like you have some intelligence or you’re a good kid, not at all,” Bridges, the son of a talent agent and actress/manager, continued.

Janet Jackson played Todd Bridges’ love interest on “Diff’rent Strokes.”
©Columbia Tristar/Courtesy Ever

Bridges appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2010 and stated that he had been sexually molested by a publicist who was also a family friend when he was 11 years old.

Bridges began acting at an early age, playing in series such as “Fish” and “Little House on the Prairie.” As Willis Jackson on the NBC comedy “Diff’rent Strokes,” he became a great success and eventually a teen idol, playing two orphaned brothers from Harlem (Bridges’ character and Gary Coleman’s Arnold Jackson), who were accepted into the home of a rich New York businessman their mother formerly worked for. The program aired from 1978 through 1985.

Bridges earlier stated that he did not encounter racism until he relocated to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Soon after, he was called the N-word while heading to football practice with his brother and a Spanish friend. He’d never heard it before and had no idea where the insult came from. Bridges said in his biography Killing Willis that things only got worse.

The cops in the San Fernando Valley “abused me so much as a teenager” as a rich, Black teen star living in a white, middle-class neighborhood. In 1983, he filed a police harassment case after being “arrested for stealing my own car,” among other racist occurrences. Other “harassments” by local cops, included “seven or eight” random traffic citations, and encounters with self-described Ku Klux Klansmen, involving his Porsche being taken, doused in gasoline, and set ablaze, he said.

Bridges suffered with crack cocaine and methamphetamine addictions in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and was jailed for attempting to murder Los Angeles-based drug dealer Kenneth “Tex” Clay. Despite his ordeals, the actor refused to blame his problems on his previous work as a child actor.

“There are too many of us that have come out great,” he said of his peers. “I had other things to deal with, pretty traumatic things as a child, that’s what affected me and had me go through other situations.”

Todd Bridges in “Everybody Hates Chris.”
3 Arts Entertainment / Courtesy

Bridges’ situation has improved. The “Everybody Hates Chris” actor claims to have made peace with his past. “I can be happy watching TV or doing the dishes. Anything that affected me back then doesn’t affect me now. You see what’s going on in the world right now, you see the racism, you still have to go through it,’ he said.

And he believes that “the next generation” will make a difference. He says his “kids’ generation doesn’t see color, they see people.”