Melissa Gilbert is standing up for Jason Bateman.
Gilbert, 61, had a strong reaction to Bateman, 56, recently claiming that he was hazed as a child on the set of “Little House on the Prairie.”
“Who? Who did this to you?!?!” Gilbert, who played Bateman’s on-screen sister, Laura Ingalls Wilder, wrote on Instagram Sunday.
“I will kick their tush… no one smacks down my little bro !” the actress added.
Bateman was 11 years old when he began playing James Cooper Ingalls, an orphan adopted by the Ingalls family, on the NBC drama series in 1981.
During his Sept. 18 appearance on “Hot Ones,” Bateman reflected on how the older child actors treated him on the show’s set.
“What they did do is they pinned me down on the ground, straddled me with knees on my shoulders and gave me noogies or whatever they call it on my chest,” Bateman said.
When host Sean Evans asked if there was “a hazing ritual” on the show, Bateman responded: “Yeah. They knocked on my chest like I was a front door.”
“And then I went to the makeup artist and said, ‘Put a big black-and-blue mark all over my chest.’ And then I went to their parents,” the “Black Rabbit” star recalled, “and I said, ‘Look what your kids did to me.’ And that was good. I got them in trouble.”
“Little House on the Prairie,” which ran for nine seasons from 1974 to 1983, also starred Michael Landon, Karen Grassle, Melissa Sue Anderson, Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush, Dean Butler, Katherine MacGregor, Richard Bull and Victor French.
A reboot of the series is currently in the works at Netflix. Alice Halsey is playing Laura.
In a 2017 interview with Variety, Bateman looked back on his experience being cast in “Little House on the Prairie.”
“That group of actors has been together since ‘Bonanza,’ and the way in which everybody functioned was very familial,” the “Ozark” alum shared. “It was a warm place, and I remember in the few years that followed, when I would end up on sets that were less functional.”
“Michael Landon was somebody who had a huge influence on me in the way he led that set as a director, as an exec producer, as a writer and actor and as somewhat of a father figure for me,” Bateman said of his former co-star, who died in July 1991.
“He was the George Clooney of that time: The crew loved him, the industry loved him, guys wanted to be him and women wanted to be with him,” Bateman added.
