After Elijah Wood reopened the discussion of pedophilia in the entertainment industry in last week’s Sunday Times, fellow former child star Corey Feldman has once again came forward with stories about the childhood abuses HE suffered at the hands of publicists, directors, and photographers. In a Hollywood Reporter interview, he says that although what he went through “was not actual rape,” that there were “some molestations and it did come from several hands.” His friend Corey Haim, though, endured more.
Feldman says [Haim], who struggled with substance abuse and died of pneumonia in 2010, experienced “direct rape” when he was 11. “My son is 11 now,” Feldman says, “and I can’t even begin to fathom the idea of something like that happening to him. It would destroy his whole being. As I look at my son, a sweet, innocent, 11-year-old boy and then try to put him in Corey Haim’s shoes, I go, ‘Oh my God — well of course he was erratic and not well-behaved on sets and things like that.’ What more could we expect of him really?” And he says, “I know every single person that interfered with his life and he knew every person that interfered with mine.”
Feldman continues:
“The people that I knew doing it were publicists, they were photographers for teen magazines, things like that. They would throw these parties where you’d walk in and it would be mostly kids and there would be a handful of adult men. The range was usually 10 to 16. That’s the networking, and that’s when you become pals with them and you get their phone numbers and you get their mom’s phone numbers and the next thing you know they talk to the moms and say, ‘Hey, I want to take Corey out to an event, this would be great for him, let me pick him up and take him.’ And they turn that power over right away to the publicist or the photographers.”
“Ask anybody in our group of kids at that time,” he reveals. “They were passing us back and forth to each other.”
On the subject of naming names, he is cagey.
“I would love to name names,” he says, although he does not. “People are frustrated, people are angry, they want to know how is this happening and they want answers,” he says. “I have to deal with that, which is not pleasant. But unfortunately California conveniently enough has a statute of limitations that prevents that from happening. Because if I were to go and mention anybody’s name I would be the one that would be in legal problems and I’m the one that would be sued. We should be talking to the district attorneys and the lawmakers in California, especially because this is where the entertainment industry is and this is a place where adults have more direct and inappropriate connection with children than probably anywhere else in the world.” And he says that one of the men who molested him is “still prominently in the business today.” He says he’s never confronted him about it.
I’m not going to fault a victim of sex abuse for not coming forward, as that doesn’t always work out for them, and their pain is their own, and the way they deal with it is there own. But goddamn, it seems like a lot of people know something…. and nobody is paying for their crimes. (via Salon)
