Family Ties Star Opens Up About Having Identity Stolen by Serial Rapist and His Own Abuse Arrest

Investigation Discovery is unpacking “Child Stars Gone Violent” in the second episode of its new series Hollywood Demons, premiering tonight — which touches on Bonsall’s 2007 arrest after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, as well as the man who coopted his identity while committing a string of rapes.

Bonsall’s troubles began after he left Hollywood and began abusing drugs and alcohol, something he’s candid about in the new doc.

“In my 20s, I was out, and met a girl at a bar. We liked each other, but it turns into a toxic situation. We were two crazy, drunk punkers trying to outdo each other and be wasted all the time,” Bonsall, now 43, said, per EW. “It was almost a competition of who can be crazier and get drunk and do wild stuff.”

“One night, our drinking had got out of control,” he admitted.

In her 911 call, Bonsall’s then-girlfriend claimed he wouldn’t let her leave the home and that he “poured whiskey in my eyes while I was asleep.” In the doc, he said the events of that night were “super blurry” — but added, “I remember holding arms, grabbing a phone. I did one of the worst things you could do, I tried to block the door. I was like, ‘I love you, don’t do this.’ At that point, you think you’re doing something to defuse it, but you’re blocking the door.”

He’s adamant he “absolutely did not” pour whiskey in her eyes, adding that both of them went to rehab, were sober fox six months and, at that point, “realized we weren’t good for each other and broke up.”

Sometime before that 2007 arrest, Bonsall had another stint in jail for a DUI — where he met a man named Nathan Loebe.

“I remember his crazy eyes,” he said of Loebe in the doc, per PEOPLE. “I met him in 2004 in jail when I was in there for my second DUI and was there for a couple or a few nights or whatever and I guess he just got really obsessed with me right off the bat.”

After getting out, he said women started telling him another man was pretending to be him to get them to go out with him.

“[One woman] said she dated a guy for three months who was nice at first. She had said that he was using my name to coax her into coming over and meet him,” Bonsall recalled, per US Magazine. “He had a bunch of my tattoos in the same places and she went on to say he turned really abusive. It was the worst thing you want to hear.”

“I started to hear more stories. A friend of mine said she knew someone who dated him and she was locked in a room and forced to watch porn while he did heroin,” he also claimed. “I went to the police in Boulder, Colorado, and I filed a report. He was like, ‘It is not illegal to tell someone you are someone else to have sex with them.'”

“The response I got was, ‘Why don’t you go handle this yourself?’ So I left there with nothing but an inactive business number,” he claimed. “This cop did not take me seriously at all and maybe it is because I was borderline the town drunk at the time.”

Bonsall’s now-wife Courtney Tuck claimed she then began hearing “from several girls who thought they were raped by Brian. The former actor eventually met with one of the women, who he said “just looked over at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re the real Brian Bonsall.'”

Loebe was eventually arrested in 2017 and, in 2019, convicted of raping seven different women over a 12-year period. He was sentenced to 274 years in prison.

“It’s hard to, like, not cry,” Bonsall says of the whole ordeal. “There’s definitely a feeling of guilt. It’s so hard to explain. Those girls, they wanted to go on a date with me because I was a child actor. It even clicked in my head that I had met this person because of some of the mistakes I made.”

Bonsall is now married to Tuck and the pair share one child. While he is no longer an actor, Bonsall  is a musician who plays with The Ataris.