Hobbit Star Says Hollywood Has Its Own Savile Scandal

Hobbit star says Hollywood has its own Savile scandal

Elijah Wood, the former child actor and star of the Lord of the Rings films, claims that Hollywood has been gripped by cases of sexual abuse similar to the Jimmy Savile scandal in Britain — and it may still be continuing.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Wood, 35, sympathised with British victims of Savile and said: “Jesus, it must have been devastating.”

He said his mother had protected him from abuse when he arrived in Hollywood aged eight, but “I’ve been led down dark paths to realise that these things probably are still happening”.

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Wood, who played Frodo Baggins, the hobbit protagonist in the films of JRR Tolkien’s books, said there were “a lot of vipers in this industry . . . there is darkness in the underbelly”.

Allegations that powerful Hollywood figures have been protecting child abusers have circulated widely in recent years and Anne Henry, co-founder of Bizparentz, a group set up to help young actors, said: “Hollywood is currently sheltering about 100 active abusers.”

"There are a lot of vipers in this industry, people who only have their own interests in mind"

After the convictions of several industry figures and claims by Corey Feldman, another former child actor, that he had been “surrounded” by molesters when he was 14, Henry warned that a “tsunami of claims has begun”.

Wood said that when he first started acting as a child his mother, Debra, had been “far more concerned with raising me to be a good human than facilitating my career. I never went to parties where that kind of thing was going on.” Yet he believes other actors remain in danger. “If you’re innocent, you have very little knowledge of the world and you want to succeed,” he said, “people with parasitic interests will see you as their prey. What upsets me about these situations is that the victims can’t speak as loudly as the people in power.”

Henry estimated about 75% of child actors who “went off the rails” later in their career had suffered abuse. “This problem has been endemic in Hollywood for a long time and it’s finally coming to light,” she said.

“I don’t believe the most powerful people in Hollywood are sitting in a darkened room plotting to spread paedophilia. But very bad people are still working here, protected by their friends.”

Hollywood’s evil secret

Oliver Thring met Elijah Wood to talk about his latest film, but the Lord of the Rings star and former child actor had other ideas. Out poured revelations about convicted paedophiles working openly in Hollywood — and deep relief that he had escaped unscathed.

Wood was a child star long before he was cast as Frodo Baggins

Elijah Wood was just eight when he arrived in Hollywood, the blue-eyed son of Iowa delicatessen owners. He had been modelling in Midwestern shopping centres for four years when his mother brought him to California to launch a career in show business. Long before Peter Jackson cast him as Frodo Baggins, the hobbit protagonist of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Wood was a child star. He took the lead in a remake of the dolphin film Flipper and before that shared top billing with Macaulay Culkin in The Good Son.

Now he knows he was lucky to escape childhood unharmed. Allegations that powerful figures in Hollywood have been sheltering child abusers have become impossible to ignore in recent years. During the past decade several convictions have been secured — and far more accusations have been levelled — against wealthy and important people in the industry. Some of these criminals have left prison, returned to Hollywood and begun working again with children.

Sitting in a Los Angeles restaurant to promote his latest film, The Trust, Wood compares revelations of child abuse in Hollywood to those that surfaced in Britain after the death of Jimmy Savile.

“You all grew up with Savile — Jesus, it must have been devastating. Clearly something major was going on in Hollywood. It was all organised. There are a lot of vipers in this industry, people who only have their own interests in mind. There is darkness in the underbelly.

“What bums me about these situations is that the victims can’t speak as loudly as the people in power,” says Wood. “That’s the tragedy of attempting to reveal what is happening to innocent people: they can be squashed, but their lives have been irreparably damaged.”

Wood says his mother, Debra, protected him: “She was far more concerned with raising me to be a good human than facilitating my career. I never went to parties where that kind of thing was going on. This bizarre industry presents so many paths of temptation. If you don’t have some kind of foundation, typically from family, then it will be difficult to deal with.”

Other child actors did not have his luck. Corey Feldman was perhaps the biggest child star of the 1980s, a hero in such hits as Gremlins, The Goonies, Stand by Me and The Lost Boys. In 2011 Feldman decided to speak out about the abuse he had suffered as a young actor.

“The No 1 problem in Hollywood was and is — and always will be — paedophilia,” he said, adding that by the time he was 14 he was “surrounded” by molesters. Feldman met another child actor, Corey Haim, on a film set in the mid-1980s. They became best friends, starring in numerous movies together and sharing their own television show.

Describing their first meeting in his memoir, Feldman wrote: “An adult male had convinced Corey that it was perfectly normal for older men and younger boys in the business to have sexual relations . . . So they walked off to a secluded area between two trailers . . . and Haim allowed himself to be sodomised.” Haim asked Feldman: “So I guess we should play around like that too?” He replied: “No, that’s not what kids do, man.”

In 2012 Feldman told a British tabloid: “When I was 14 and 15, things were happening to me. These older men were leching around like vultures. It was basically me lying there pretending I was asleep and them going about their business.”

Both actors went on to suffer mental health problems, alcoholism and addiction to drugs including crack and heroin. In 2010, aged 38, Haim died of pneumonia, having reportedly attempted rehab 15 times. Feldman said a “Hollywood mogul” was to blame for his friend’s death, adding: “The people who did this to me are still out there and still working — some of the richest, most powerful people in this business.”

“People look at Corey Feldman and think he’s a drug addict, so why should they listen to him?” says Anne Henry, co-founder of the BizParentz Foundation, an organisation established to protect child actors. “But that plays into the predators’ hands. They don’t want victims to be believed. We estimate that about 75% of the child actors who ‘went off the rails’ suffered earlier abuse. Drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide attempts, wandering through life without a purpose — they can all be symptoms.”

In the mid-2000s Henry was the proud mother of an 11-year-old child actor when she spotted shirtless photographs of him trading on eBay for up to $400 each. “My kid wasn’t famous,” she says. “But pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio when he was 11 were only selling for 10 bucks so I was worried.”

She realised that a number of eBay users were trading photographs of young boys, who were often semi-naked and staring up into the camera in positions that mimicked child abuse. Henry says her research led her “to websites where men boasted about following these kids, where they ‘screencapped’ little boys on the TV every night. We found fetish sites: one still exists that is focused on little boys working in the entertainment industry, full of pictures of them in wet swimsuits. We eventually learnt that our kids’ photographs were being used as gateways to child pornography sites.”

Bob Villard, an agent who managed the young DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, was convicted of selling images of children on eBay. As far back as 1987 Villard had been found in possession of child pornography and in 2005 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for committing a “lewd act” on a 13-year-old boy who had asked him for acting lessons. There is no suggestion that DiCaprio or Maguire was ever a victim of abuse.

Henry felt ill at what she had discovered. She began educating other parents of child actors — including several famous ones — about what was taking place. And then, she says, the stories of sexual assault began to pour in. In the past 10 years Henry claims she has heard hundreds of episodes of alleged abuse of child actors in Hollywood, ranging from inappropriate comments to sexual violence and rape.

“We believe Hollywood is currently sheltering about 100 active abusers,” she says at home in Los Angeles. “The tsunami of claims has begun. This problem has been endemic in Hollywood for a long time and it’s finally coming to light.”

What should have brought the issue even greater attention is a documentary called An Open Secret by the Oscar-nominated director Amy Berg. The film, which is not easy to watch, either in practical terms or because of its content, tells the stories of five former child actors who claim to be victims of serious abuse. Some of their attackers have gone to jail.

Evan Henzi, 22, tells me by email that “sexual abuse is a huge problem in Hollywood and there is absolutely no support system”. He was molested dozens of times over several years from the age of 11 by his agent, a paedophile named Martin Weiss. In home-movie footage recorded at a birthday party in the Henzi family home, one young boy turns to the camera and says: “I’m getting a massage and it feels great, and I don’t care whether or not it looks bad.”

“It’s above the waist,” says Weiss, who is touching the boy. “It’s not bad.”

Elijah Wood says child actors who are abused are never able to speak as loudly as those in power: their attackers

Henzi eventually helped to secure Weiss’s conviction after, he tells me, “a moment of truth for myself. I secretly recorded an hour-long conversation in which my abuser admitted he sexually abused me. I decided to beat fear with truth.”

But Weiss spent just six months in prison. “I was worried that he could try to harm me because he threatened me when I was younger,” Henzi once said. Weiss is now rumoured to be working again in the entertainment industry.

The most explosive allegations of Hollywood paedophilia surround “pool parties” at a Los Angeles mansion in the late 1990s. These were hosted primarily by one man, Marc Collins-Rector. He had co-founded Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a precursor to YouTube and Netflix, which generated its own content — some of it with overtly pederastic tones — for online release.

DEN attracted almost $100m of investment from Hollywood giants, including David Geffen and Michael Huffington, as well as Bryan Singer, now one of the most feted directors in Hollywood, and the film maker behind The Usual Suspects and the billion-dollar-grossing X-Men franchise.

Geffen, Huffington and Singer were all at the parties but none is accused of any wrongdoing.

Hollywood's Pedophilia Problem
Why did Arianna Huffington's husband invest $5 million in an internet startup whose sole purpose was introducing older men to younger boys? Why did David Geffen invest $500,000 in the same company? Why is Brian Peck, a convicted pedophile, a registered sex offender, accused of sexually abusing a Nickelodeon child star still allowed to work in Hollywood with child actors? Why did SAG-AFTRA threaten to sue the producer of An Open Secret after the documentary exposed a child predator high within the union's ranks? We meet Anne Henry whose research served as the basis for An Open Secret a new documentary from Oscar nominated Director Amy Berg. An Open Secret reveals Hollywood's long history of failing to protect child actors from sexual abuse. We are also joined by Gabe Hoffman who produced the documentary, and David Robb who covers labour for Deadline Hollywood.

At these parties, Collins-Rector and other men are alleged to have sexually assaulted at least six teenage boys, according to lawsuits filed in 2000 and 2014. Michael Egan, who was a teenager at the time of the alleged abuse, sued Singer and two other men, alleging serious sexual abuse in 1999. He had to drop this suit after he was found to have been contradicting himself. A federal judge also accused him of lying in court.

Singer has denied all claims of child abuse and said the accusations against him were a “sick, twisted shakedown”.

Another convicted paedophile, Brian Peck, was also a guest at the parties. Singer had given him cameo roles in two of the X-Men films and asked him to join him for the director’s commentary on one of the movies’ DVDs. In 2004 Peck was found guilty of abusing a famous young actor on the Nickelodeon network.

After prison Peck returned to Hollywood, where he accepted a role as a dialogue coach on the sitcom Anger Management, starring Charlie Sheen. Peck later went on to play, of all things, a sex education teacher in a film.

My dream is to see a watchdog in Hollywood advocating against child sexual abuse and rape

Henry is outraged that Peck still works in Hollywood: “I’m disgusted with the people who continue to hire him. I hope audiences will vote with their wallets. Don’t watch these films: make it clear to the studios that you won’t have anything to do with organisations that re-employ convicted predators.”

And if you were considering watching An Open Secret, that may not be simple. Matthew Valentinas, its executive producer, has said: “There was major interest at Cannes [in 2014]. They’d say, ‘We love it, don’t show it to anyone else.’ But then someone on the business side would step in and all of a sudden there was no longer interest.”

The film failed to find a distributor and apparently never will, though online messageboards suggest viewers are keen to see it and it can be found on YouTube. To make matters worse, its other executive producer, Gabe Hoffman, apparently fell out with its director and was last year reported to be taking her to court for not “co-operating” in the film’s promotion.

Valentinas referred me to Hoffman when I asked to speak to him about child abuse in Hollywood; neither Hoffman nor Berg returned my emails.

Hollywood’s reluctance to publicise An Open Secret can be contrasted with its enthusiasm for films dealing with child abuse that occurred elsewhere. As Henzi says: “In recent years, the movie industry has done a great job bringing these issues to the fore, but when it comes to sex crimes committed by its own, everyone is more hush-hush.”

Spotlight, the account of an American newspaper’s dogged investigation into child rapists in the Catholic church, won the best picture at the Oscars in March. Berg herself was previously nominated for an Academy Award for her 2006 documentary into a similar scandal, Deliver Us From Evil. Consequently, questions of a cover-up have surfaced.

“I don’t believe that the most powerful people in Hollywood are sitting in a darkened room plotting to spread paedophilia,” says Henry. “But very bad people are still working here, protected by their friends. Worse, the media and entertainment industries have a cosy relationship in this country — and we’ve already had one Hollywood actor become president. This is why we’ve been relying on British media to report this story much more than American media.”

Hoffman has said An Open Secret “makes it clear that Hollywood is not adequately policing itself”. And Wood told me that having seen An Open Secret, he believes the film “only scratches the surface. I feel there was much more to this story than it articulates.”

Roman Polanski was charged in 1977 with five offences against a 13-year-old girl, including raping, drugging and sodomising. He struck a plea bargain and was convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Fearing a jail sentence, Polanski fled the US and has never returned. He continues to make films in Europe and has received an Oscar while being the subject of an Interpol “red notice” for absconding.

“Everyone wants to fuck young girls,” he once opined in an interview.

An Open Secret, a documentary about the abuse of child actors, directed by Amy Berg has failed to find a distributor

The tragedy of that gruesome Hollywood trope, the “casting couch”, is its victims: young actors of both sexes forced to grant sexual favours to directors and producers, and damaged as a result.

Henry says she and her family have received numerous death threats from “emissaries of people accused of abuse . . . We’ve had to move home twice, increase our security. People have parked outside our house and watched us. We’re tired and weary — but with the evidence we have, we could have made 10 films like An Open Secret.”

Henzi writes in an email: “The thing about Hollywood is that there is not some secret ‘illuminati’ or top agenda. Just because someone is a famous director or actor does not give them immunity from the law. My dream is to see an established presence in Hollywood advocating against child sexual abuse, rape, sexual harassment and all sex crimes.”

He may have some time to wait. I ask Wood whether he believes this is still a problem for Hollywood. “From my reading and research,” he says, “I’ve been led down dark paths to realise that these things probably still are happening. If you’re innocent — you have very little knowledge of the world and you want to succeed — people with parasitic interests will see you as their prey.”

The Trust is in UK cinemas and on video-on-demand services from May 27.