This is a long post and is better suited to a blog but since I have no blog I'll post it here. Some of the following is based on rumor and should therefore be treated with a grain of salt, especially in light of the subject matter.

Do pedophiles run Hollywood?

A recent click-baity article by the tabloid Radar Online states that a well known Hollywood actor will soon be outed by friends of the late Corey Haim as a pedophile. Radar has supposedly been conducting an investigation into this individual, described as a pedophile "kingpin," for over four years.

Haim was a Canadian child actor who -- according to his friend Corey Feldman -- was raped by a powerful Hollywood producer at the age of eleven, raped again as a fourteen-year-old on the set of the film Lucas, and passed around like a party treat to Hollywood pedophiles alongside Feldman himself. Feldman's account is corroborated by Alison Arngrim from Little House on the Prairie, who said in an interview, "Everybody knew that the two Coreys were just being passed around." Got that? Everybody knew.

By all accounts Haim was a friendly, kind-hearted and talented kid who (in Feldman's words) was "chewed up and spat out" by the Hollywood pedocracy. Roger Ebert's review of Lucas now comes off as tragic: "If he can continue to act this well, he will never become a half-forgotten child star, but will continue to grow into an important actor. He is that good." Haim descended into depression and drug abuse and died of pneumonia (probably brought on by drugs or AIDS) at the age of 38.

Notably, the year he died, Corey Haim was not featured in the Academy Award's annual "They shall be missed" death list. Nor indeed was another gifted child actor, Bred Renfro, the year he died. Renfro, who passed away at the age of 25 due to a heroin overdose, made his first appearance in Joel Schumacher's The Client. Schumacher also directed both Corey's in The Lost Boys -- an 80's horror-comedy about vampires whose title and themes become significantly more sinister in retrospect. Brad Renfro went on to star in Apt Pupil, directed by pedophile superstar Brian Singer (The Usual Suspects, The X-Men). Singer is alleged to have drugged and raped a 15 year old boy named Michael Egan and is connected to various Hollywood pedophiles including the notorious producer Marc Collins-Rector.

During filming of Lost Boys, Joel Schumacher (who describes himself as a "sexual outlaw") inserted a scene involving Corey Haim naked in a bathtub. During filming of Apt Pupil, Brian Singer was sued by the parents of underage teenage boys who were required to "strip naked for hours while he shot a shower scene." Both Schumacher and Singer remain powerful Hollywood directors and receive no shortage of work.

Yet another great child actor, River Phoenix, who starred alongside Corey Feldman in Stand by Me, is reported to have been abused by Gus Van Sant during the filming of My Private Idaho. Phoenix died of a drug overdose when he was 23. Van Sant, Singer and Schumacher all describe themselves as gay rather than pedophiles. They simply "like 'em young." Okay, but when does "young" become too young or much, much too young? And what about the enormous power differentials? Would a straight teenage boy willingly have sex with an older gay man without a great deal of coercion?

Corey Feldman, for his part, has gained notoriety for his increasingly bizarre behavior and his friendship with the late Michael Jackson, but also for his willingness to openly discuss the abuse he suffered as a child actor in Hollywood. Despite his openness, Feldman has refused to name names. The statute of limitations for the abuse suffered by the two Corey's has long since passed, which means that if Feldman were to fully spill the beans, he could be charged with libel and bankrupted (personally I think Feldman should do it anyway; at this point in time he would garner considerable support).

Rumors have long circulated that Charlie Sheen is the adult male who raped Corey Haim on the set of the 1986 film Lucas. Charlie would have only been 21 years old at the time, but a quick glance at a photo from the set of the film reveals the profound difference a few years can make during adolescence.

Evidence to support this theory includes this quote from Feldman:

"Well I have to be completely honest and say, I'm not a huge fan of Charlie Sheen. I don't make it my goal to ever talk badly in the press, we're all in it together, that's the way I look at it, but Charlie in particular, especially the way that he's affected other people that I know — point blank, Charlie and Corey started their careers pretty much together, and Corey fought for his entire life to recover from those early experiences and to get his life together."

Further evidence is supplied by a previous Radar article:

Finally, in 2004, actor Brian Peck admitted that he had molested his protégé. However, this revelation has not prevented him from continuing to work in Hollywood – even on children’s movies like Jack and the Beanstalk. What’s more, Peck was allegedly hired by the same Tinseltown kingpin at the center of the Haim molestation scandal.

Beck went on to work for the Anger Management television show featuring Charlie and Martin Sheen.

Charlie was certainly the most powerful actor on the set of Lucas. This was the era of Platoon and Wall Street and the brat pack, and Charlie came from Hollywood royalty. Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Martin Sheen, is still considered one of the top ten greatest war films.

Coppola is a questionable character in his own right, and not just because his nephew is Nicholas Cage (I'm actually a big fan of Cage). He has rallied behind the writer and film director Victor Salva, who was convicted of raping a 12 year old boy on the set of Clownhouse -- which was filmed at Coppola's house. Coppola claims he "didn't know of anything improper going on", but also that "the difference in age between Victor and the boy was very small -- Victor was practically a child himself." Actually, Victor was then 29 years old.

Victor Salva went on make Powder -- set in a high school -- and Jeeper's Creepers, a horror film financed by Coppola about a monster who hunts teenagers. In one scene, the monster sniff's a character's dirty underwear; in another, it sucks the tongue from a mouth of a corpse.

It seems plausible to me that Charlie was himself abused. According to one of Haim's friends quoted in the Radar piece, Haim's rapist claimed that it was "natural for boys in the business to have sexual relations, that it was what all the guys do." It may well be that Pedophilia is not the exception amongst Hollywood big whigs -- it is the rule. In that case, the above quote is actually accurate. Amongst the former clients of convicted pedophile manager Bob Villard are Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. Abuse may even be the price many pay for stardom.

In light of all this, the choice of the film Spotlight for 2016 Best Picture is grimly ironic. It may have been a way for members of the Academy to covertly draw attention to problems in their own house. More likely it was an attempt to deflect attention back onto the Church.

There was an important documentary released recently titled An Open Secret. Directed by the academy award nominated filmmaker of Deliver us from Evil, it failed to find a distributor. Only a few publications even bothered to review it. The film points to the A-List director Brian Singer as one of many Hollywood pedophiles using their power to exploit and abuse children. Singer's fondness for "twinks" was already well known when the film was released six months ago. But his tastes appear to go beyond young men to boys. In fact you find can revolting pictures online of Singer brazenly posing with his underage victims.

I'm not a sexual prude. I don't care if someone likes 'em a little young. However what "An Open Secret" points to has nothing to do with unconventional love. The film reveals a system of mass exploitation and perversion where children are pimped out to Hollywood VIPs then left to rot. We are not talking about a few bad apples but a systemic problem with roots going back decades. Most of the boys exploited by the these creeps are not even homosexual, and many are mere children, which automatically rules out consent. Girls are obviously exploited as well. I shudder to think of what probably happened to Shirley Temple.

In part 2 of this post I will explore the implications of what An Open Secret and the Haim/Feldman scandal reveal about the Hollywood power structure. To an alarming extent, pedophiles really are running the show.