Perhaps because, maybe, child molestation isn’t nearly as endemic in Hollywood as Feldman is making it out to be?
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem believing that Haim & Feldman each suffered a terribly traumatic experience, nor do I have any problem believing that some Hollywood people are complicit in circling the wagons to protect the reputation of a single bad apple – heck, even Penn State did that. But there are tens of thousands of child actors who have worked in Hollywood at any given time, some of whom have become quite famous and powerful, and I just don’t see any of them lining up to make these kind of accusations.
As with Jeremy Piven & Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr.'s only a few years older than Feldman (yeah, hard to believe he’s only 51!) and Kiefer Sutherland’s even younger, just 3½ years older than Feldman.
I sure wish Feldman would hurry up and name his abuser already, just to put an end to all this baseless speculation. :smack:
whem I first heard this … he made it sound like a Jackson type of thing
these Hollywood guys would have weekend parties and would invite al lthe young boys who were acting and pass them around and it was understood if you wanted to act or continue acting you went and did what they wanted you too …
The worst possible answer is not Donald Sutherland - it’s James Garner. He was in Murphy’s Romance with Corey Haim. That would rip my guts out.
I’m fairly certain though, that I heard Feldman say Haim’s first outright rape was by a producer, when Haim was eleven. At some point Feldman’s agent was also named. (Weis, I think it was?) He actually got a year in jail for molesting an unnamed kid that he managed.
You know, movie sets are often rife with other actors stopping by. There’s no reason that whoever did this had to be a co-star, but just someone who happened to be there and developed an interest. :mad:
Well, if you look at the crew for Firstborn, his first credit, we see the following;
Stanley R. Jaffe … executive producer
Paul Junger Witt … producer
Ron Koslow … co-producer
Sherry Lansing … executive producer
Alice Shure … associate producer
Tony Thomas … producer
Seems Jaffe, Witt, Koslow and Thomas have worked together a lot, including all of them on Beauty and the Beast.
If one listens to Corey Feldman, you get the sense that people in Hollywood have an extremely different view of “revered” and “A-list” than ordinary schmoes like you or me. Feldman has also previously stated his abuser was not a particularly powerful individual, but was an assistant hired by his (Feldman’s) father.
The Corey Feldman thing… look, I watched the “Today Show” performance and laughed too, but when you dig a little deeper the Feldman story is actually not at all funny. He’s a broken and sick individual, and whatever happened to him before, he’s now basically running a personal escort service out of his own house and preying on troubled young women. If you can offer me any more sympathetic interpretation of “Corey’s Angels” I’m willing to listen but I don’t think you can.
Feldman is about as screwed up in the head as a person can be and still have legal control over his own affairs, and while that may be in part due to sexual exploitation, he is also a person who had no real or correctly directed childhood and has a viewpoint warped by living in a fame bubble more or less his whole life. I feel really sorry for him.
That’s always a possibility, but I try to err on the side of believing someone who said that they have been victimized, or at the very least not disbelieving them immediately. Fake rape allegations do happen, but they are hugely dwarfed by true rape allegations.
Would that really happen? Has there ever been a case where someone in Hollywood was accusing another of a terrible misdeed, and there were thousands of high-powered lawyers lining up to take the case pro bono? It seems optimistic that that would be the case.
If the abusers are truly high powered and beloved, I’d think a lot of lawyers would be hesitant to take on the case. Or even if some eager beaver lawyer was wanting to go for it, maybe their law firm would be hesitant. And even if you get some good lawyers working for you pro bono, the rich and powerful accused is going to have a team of the best lawyers, and will be able to outlast you.
Also, the Coreys are far from perfect witnesses. They both have had drug problems and erratic behavior, and Haim is dead and anything he said would be hearsay. Even if Feldman has pretty compelling proof, I can easily see lawyers spinning things as being taken out of context or lies and that Feldman is a weird desperate has-been who’s trying to get money and the limelight.
In a better world, your scenario would happen, but I don’t think we’re in that world.
as I remember it, he said something more strongly worded than that at first, then literally the next day walked it back to “I’ve heard about such things.”
That’s what I don’t understand. So he gets sued, so what? If what he says is shown to be the truth, what’s the downside, other than that there would be no criminal charges for the accused?
In the Hollywood Reporter interview linked on the first page Feldman agreed that Elijah wouldn’t have had any direct knowledge.
Here is another Hollywood Reporter interview where Wood clarifies his previous statement. Looking at what he said originally he did not go into specifics which would point to any eyewitness experiences. The claim that his comments came on the heels of watching An Open Secret seem plausible. I see no reason to doubt him.
There’s that pesky “proving it” part of revealing the truth in this line of thing. Factuality is a defense against libel/slander, but actually has the burden of proof in court there? It has to be the defendant, right?
Well, we’re pretty much in agreement. I think my opinion is valid through; it’s not knee-jerk.
Here’s the thing … yes, Feldman and, more so, Haim had troubled adult years following their childhood movie stardom. But so have dozens of other child actors; were they all raped by the same guy too?
And it’s not like these two, always thick as thieves, were anything more than (I’ll be charitable) talent-light actors trying as hard as they could to scream, “Look at me, look at me, look at me!” It all seems just a little too over the top to me. Really? There’s a secret cabal consisting of everyone you see in the movies who fuck all the boy actors in Hollywood? Of course. Why wouldn’t there be? Besides, I’ve seen Corey Feldman act and every time I’ve heard him talking about this issue, he sounds like he’s acting. He’s not a very good actor.
Anyway … if that kind of shit really happened to them, I’ll be the first to step up and call myself an asshole and offer as much sympathy and support as I can, but right now this just doesn’t pass the smell test to me. It’s all a little too convenient that a notorious attention-whore is floating all these little tidbits - but nothing concrete.
For about 3 seconds I thought it might have been a director that Hollywood passed over for Oscars for almost a decade for no external reason (unless it was maybe “You stop buggering little boys & maybe we’ll think about it”).
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that’s just not possible.
Yeah, that’s what hangs me up. I believe both Coreys were molested. I believe other kids have been molested. For that matter, I believe teenage girls and young women have been asked to put out in order to get/keep jobs. What I do not believe is that there is this Watergate-caliber conspiracy, with hundreds of people all complicit in buggering pre-teen boys. And that not only are some of the participants people very high up in the echelon, but no one in power has ever disapproved enough to shut it down, not even by refusing to work with the conspirators.
You said it before I could: Feldman is an attention junkie. Notice how this revelation comes days after his Today show debacle? If it’s officially announced that Charlie Sheen molested Corey Haim, I’ll probably believe it, although it’s interesting that Feldman would name someone whose reputation is such that anyone could throw anything at him and it would stick. But I can’t believe that this is a “Follow the money” situation, where one name revealed will lead to another and another, until all the dominos fall.
I believe there are some nasty, opportunistic sickos in Hollywood. I just don’t believe that they’re all highly placed, and have a network, and that everyone in Los Angeles, including LAPD and DCFS, is committed to a conspiracy of silence. If there’s any common factor in keeping things under wraps, it’s probably the simple and common matter of kids being afraid to tell.
it’s probably like any large organization where there are a few “bad actors” doing these things, and others within the organization complicit in keeping it hidden so as not to make the organization look bad. See: the Catholic Church, Penn State. Not rocking the boat to keep from potentially losing their jobs is more important than some kid they might not even have ment.