Jennette McCurdy talks losing her virginity at age 18 during 'exhausting' relationship with older man

Jennette McCurdy has revealed she lost her virginity at the age of 18 to a man in his 30s.

The former iCarly star – who wrote the controversial memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died based on her allegedly abusive relationship with her late mother, Debra McCurdy - described her romance with this older man as toxic and even 'creepy.'

McCurdy, now 33, used it as the inspiration for her debut novel, Half His Age, which comes out January 20.

She spoke about the experience on the Call Her Daddy  podcast while promoting the book.

'[We met] through work. There's nowhere to meet anybody else. All I did was work,' she told host Alex Cooper, per People.

'I think I was 18 by the time he started working on the show. I think. I'm not sure about that. It's possible I was younger, but I was most likely 18,' said the Nickelodeon star, who also said she doesn't want kids despite freezing her eggs.

'He would show me movies that he thought I would like. Like, Dazed and Confused, which I did not like but I pretended to like. He would play me music that I did not like, but I pretended to like,' she continued, as reported by E! News.

The relationship happened during a difficult time in her life when her mom was ill with breast cancer - the disease claimed her mom’s life three years later.

The age-gap was troublesome on its own, but adding to the confusion was the fact it began when the man had another long-term girlfriend whom he was also living with.

'It was just exhausting,' McCurdy said. 'I remember he came over drunk one night to my apartment. At this point I’ve moved out of my mom’s, I’m very new - also red flags all over.'

She said the man eventually broke up with the girlfriend to be with McCurdy and pushed his way into moving in with her, even though she was taking care of her ailing mom who had been in hospital.

McCurdy described the scenario to podcast host Cooper.

'I can’t have my dying mother and my boyfriend that she doesn’t know about and would never approve of staying at my apartment at the same time,' she said.

'We have a dilemma on our hands. He uses the "You can’t meet my needs" thing a lot. I go, "OK, I’ll get us a hotel room."'

Not knowing anything about these things, the young McCurdy booked a room nearby Universal Studios.

'That was like my idea of a good hotel,' she recalled, adding, 'I was like, hopeful, like "Maybe we can go on the Hogwarts ride!"'

McCurdy revealed that she was in the complete dark about sex, made worse when the man pressured her to participate in certain sexual activities.

'Now, it’s funny but at the time it was difficult to kind of regroup and figure out, "What was that exactly?"' she recalled.

McCurdy’s 30-something boyfriend would compliment her by saying, 'I can’t talk to anyone this way, I can’t believe how smart you are,' and say how 'mature' she was for her age.

In the end, McCurdy recalls the experience left her feeling 'powerless.; She broke up with him after her mom died in 2013, calling him a 'f—king loser.'

'Can you imagine now being with like a [teenager]? Creepy,' McCurdy reflected.

It’s been speculated by fans on Reddit and online reports that McCurdy’s older man – who she also detailed in her 2022 memoir, referring to him as ‘Joe’ – is Paul Glaser, who worked as a script manager on the iCarly set.

McCurdy told Vulture in 2015: ‘I put my feelings of love toward someone other than my mother, who had been the receiver of all that love up until that point.

‘I needed to go through that loss on my own. I felt that I would put too much of myself into another person and become very attached.'

McCurdy dated Andre Drummond in 2013 after they started flirting on social media. She was 21 and he was 20 at the time.

She also briefly dated her Between co-star Jesse Carere in 2015.