The rigors of voice acting and traversing the cartoon world have apparently become too much for Fatima Ptacek, the teen who voices the titular traveler on Dora The Explorer and Dora And Friends: Into The City!. The actress, who’s played Dora for six years, inadvertently updated a Brownsville Station song when she was caught vaping in the girls’ room of her private high school in Chelsea, New York. You see, this what happens when you have a talking map instead of a moral compass.
Perhaps getting a leg up on a future episode about peer pressure, Ptacek reportedly persuaded a younger student to join her and another classmate in partaking of some caramel-flavored water (Boots probably made off with the tobacco). A senior at the school reported all three girls, who received disparate punishments: Ptacek’s friend emerged unscathed, while Ptacek was suspended for three days. But the younger girl was expelled from the school because, according to the unnamed teen’s parents, its administrators deemed her less “trustworthy” than the celebrity student who got her to vape in the first place. Now the expelled teen’s parents are suing the school for tuition reimbursement and legal fees, claiming that their daughter was made the scapegoat because of Ptacek’s fame.