Kids Choice Awards Incident

The Kids Choice Awards Incident (KCA Incident for short) was an incident that occurred during Nickelodeon’s 2025 Kids Choice Awards where a teenager from the audience disrupted the ceremony by claiming that the award show was rigged. It happened during Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke’s acceptance speech for SpongeBob SquarePants’ twenty-second win for Best Cartoon.
==Incident==
When SpongeBob SquarePants had its twenty-second win for Best Cartoon, the show’s voice actors, Tom Kenny (the title character) and Bill Fagerbakke (Patrick Star) took the stage for their acceptance speech, when a teenage boy from the audience ran on to the stage and started ranting and cussing live about the awards show being rigged. Two security guards came in and dragged him off the stage, Kenny and Fagerbakke left the stage in shock and embarrassment without finishing their speech, and the ceremony went off the air for a few minutes. When the ceremony came back, the host apologised for the incident.
== Aftermath==
The day after the awards, the incident made headlines. Many compared it to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards Kanye West-Taylor Swift incident. According to one newscast, the incident shocked some viewers and appalled others, while a large group of viewers were not surprised; Nickelodeon was accused of rigging the awards years before the incident, and when the incident happened, many learned that the accusations may have been true and some threatened to boycott the network unless president Brian Robbins (who was not directly responsible for the practice) was fired from the network. Robbins was not dismissed, but the network was put under investigation.
Audience attendees of the KCA over the years have claimed that people knew it was rigged and that Nickelodeon tried to cover it all up. “The audience has been booing the winners at the Kids’ Choice Awards for years,” an attendee exclaimed, “Obviously, you would not hear it if you were watching the awards on TV, because they would cut off the audience’s noise and pump in recorded crowd noise.”
A former Nickelodeon employee later gave evidence that the network was, in fact, rigging the awards, only giving the award to the executives’ choice rather than the actual audience’s choice. In light of the evidence, Nickelodeon was ordered to pay $20 million in damages.
As for the perpetrator, he would be called a hero for exposing the rigging allegations despite being banned from future KCA events. The boy later posted a TikTok short warning people in the future not to repeat what he did, wrapping up with the words, “I learned it the hard way.”
Although the network had been going through a stagnant phase throughout much of the last decade to that moment, as well as being heavily criticized for its constant management issues and its over-reliance of certain IPs, this incident (along with the Dan Schneider scandal) is cited to be the final nail in the coffin for Nickelodeon, as it deeply tarnished any slimmers of the network’s brand reputation for good. Since then, however, Nickelodeon has announced it would take steps to improve its work ethics.
Category:Events
Category:Nickelodeon
Category:Kids Choice Awards