Via the Guardian:
“The biggest problem in Hollywood,” he repeats, mantra-like, “is paedophilia.” His fellow former child actor Alison Arngrim has said, “I literally heard that [the Two Coreys] were ‘passed around’. The word was they were given drugs and being used for sex.”
According to Feldman, Haim was raped by “a major Hollywood figure” while making the 1986 film Lucas. Reviewing that film, Roger Ebert predicted that Haim would “grow into an important actor. He is that good.” He was, but instead he became a bloated and bankrupt shell of a man, forced in later years to appear on reality TV shows in which he was so out of it he hardly knew where he was. “He made me promise before he died that I would get the truth out,” says Feldman. It would be an understatement to say this has become a crusade for him, much to the dismay of Haim’s mother, Judy, who agrees her son was abused, but says Feldman is exploiting his memory.
Today, Feldman is pacing around his house anxiously because his long-promised documentary, which he wrote, directed and financed, is likely to be delayed yet again because of a problem with the insurance. It is provisionally titled Truth: The Rape of the Two Coreys. Feldman says he not only names his and Haim’s abusers after almost a decade of hints and promises, but also taps into what he insists is a conspiracy to protect them. The fact that he can’t get his film out is, in his eyes, proof of this. “Nobody wants to go after the bad guys,” he says and he shows me emails from lawyers denying him access to police reports and video footage. “What the hell is really going on here?” he asks.
The truth is, surrounded by his toys, raging about “deep, dangerous” conspiracies, yes, he absolutely does. But Harvey Weinstein hired ex-Mossad agents to discredit journalists who were investigating him and women who accused him of rape. So crazy can sometimes be the truth.
Feldman worked steadily, progressing from adverts to sitcoms and finally movies. He says he loved being on set with other kids and the chance to get away from what he describes as his miserable home life and occasionally violent parents. He describes this brief happy period in his 2013 memoir, which, like Feldman’s house and Feldman himself, looks at first glance completely absurd. It is called, inevitably, Coreyography, and in the acknowledgments he thanks, among others, Hugh Hefner “and the rest of the Playboy family” and “Katherine Jackson and the Jackson family”.
But again, first impressions do Feldman a disservice because Coreyography is pretty good. It evokes that weird bubble in the 80s when Hollywood was suddenly overrun with child stars – Ricky Schroeder, Sean Astin, the Phoenixes, Ethan Hawke – as the entertainment industries tapped into the exploding children’s market. Many of these films were made by Steven Spielberg, who comes across in the book as a kindly figure, if, retrospectively, one with questionable judgment. He invited Michael Jackson to his sets and introduced him to the child actors, including Feldman.
Feldman met Haim when the two were cast in The Lost Boys and it seemed to them that they were destined to be best friends: they had the same name, were the same age (14) and were even the same religion (Jewish). According to Feldman, Haim confided in him that his rapist had told him: “If you want to be in this business, you have to do these things.” Just a year later, Feldman has said, he was regularly being molested by Jon Grissom, now a convicted paedophile, who was hired by Feldman’s father to look after him. In an attempt to get away from Grissom, Feldman went to stay with a man he calls “Ralph Kaufman” in the book, since identified as Alphy Hoffman, who ran a social club for young Hollywood stars. Feldman says he molested him, too. “I needed some normalcy in my life,” Feldman writes in his memoir. His parents weren’t an option, “so I called Michael Jackson”.
Two years ago, I interviewed Rob Reiner, who directed Feldman in Stand By Me, and we discussed the fates of the four young child stars in it: River Phoenix overdosed at 23, Feldman claims he was abused, Wil Wheaton and Jerry O’Connell got through unscathed. I asked Reiner if he thought that reflected a child star’s chances: 50/50 that they would end up OK. “I don’t know if it’s reflective of child actors exactly, but more about whether child actors have enough of a familial foundation to withstand the difficulties,” Reiner replied. In other words, the problem is the parents, not the movies.
Feldman bristles when I tell him Reiner’s theory. “I think that’s a nice excuse. I love Rob, but he’s off base. What happened to Corey Haim on the set of Lucas was, yes, of course, because his parents were negligent. But there were bad actors on the set who shouldn’t have been there and have been protected since,” he says.
