Bill Donohue comments on the ongoing sexual abuse of children in Hollywood:
Back in 2011, actor Corey Feldman blew the lid off of what he termed “the number one problem in Hollywood”: sexual abuse of child actors by industry managers, publicists and agents. Feldman blamed the troubled life and early death of his best friend, fellow child actor Corey Haim, on Haim having been raped and sexually abused by a “Hollywood mogul” years before.
Now the Hollywood Reporter is out with an interview in which Feldman charges that, five years later, this scandal is “growing, not shrinking.” Yet the silence, within the entertainment industry and the media, remains deafening.
Last November, I wrote about the media and film industry’s suppression of the movie “An Open Secret,” which provided a devastating look at the way Hollywood predators manipulated, intimidated, and raped aspiring child actors. In contrast to the movie “Spotlight,” hailed by reviewers and industry moguls for its treatment of the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal in the Boston Archdiocese, “An Open Secret” received few screening opportunities and even less media attention. “Though it was directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg,” Business Insider notes this week, “the film had a very small theatrical release.”
The reason is obvious. While Hollywood heaps plaudits upon itself for forthrightly confronting the sexual abuse of children in “Spotlight”, it has no interest in turning the spotlight on its own abuse scandal.
Rather than aggressively address that scandal—as the Catholic Church has done—Hollywood continues to protect its child predators. And so the problem, as Corey Feldman attests, only grows worse.
