News & Opinion

In separate interviews, Matt Lauer and Megyn Kelly on the Today show Monday voiced the thought most viewers may have been thinking at home: Corey Feldman surely doesn’t need $10 million to make a movie to name the six Hollywood men he claims abused him. He should just name them.

This naming is given an even greater urgency given Feldman says the men are still working in Hollywood.

One of the men, Feldman said, now works for the Los Angeles Dodgers, having run a “child’s club” in Hollywood. Another was former talent manager Marty Weiss, who Feldman has accused before.

Feldman said he had given the names of the men before, in 1993 to the Santa Barbara Police Department, and they ignored him.

Instead, the feature film Feldman wants to make will, according to a YouTube video he released, “the most honest and true depiction of child abuse ever portrayed.” Feldman clearly, indeed desperately, wants to do what he considers the right thing.

Feldman will apparently oversee every aspect of the film, as he is clearly frustrated that he has been “misunderstood and degraded at great levels.” He also said two trucks had sped at him in “a near-death experience.” Several of his bandmates have quit in fear of their lives. He needs lawyers and protection, Feldman said.

But if his aim is to protect innocent children, as Feldman said, surely the best thing to do would be go to authorities or the media again, and report or name the six men, particularly if they are still working around young people.

The most pressing issue is time. Feldman has only raised just over $200,000 of the $10 million for the movie, and even after the fundraising drive is completed (if ever), then there will be the making of the movie, and release of the movie.

So, if Feldman has his way, allegedly active abusers will carry on their abuse while he makes his movie. Judy, the mother of actor Corey Haim who was also abused when he was a child, said that Feldman doesn’t need $10 million to reveal who the abusers are. Feldman accused Haim of being “a bad woman who vehemently protects evil.”

“I’m the victim here, I’ve been abused,” Feldman told Lauer, when Lauer queried Feldman’s methods. There were “thousands” of people who knew who the six abusers were—why was this all on him? One can empathize with his absolute frustration, as it is the frustration of someone who feels fundamentally unheard, but monetizing and delaying the naming of abusers is not the solution.

But making the abuse he has gone through into a potential profit-maker wouldn’t be immoral—if Feldman was comfortable in so doing it—if he wasn’t dangling the possibility of names being revealed much further down the line of people when they could be abusing young people now.

“I vow I will release any names I have knowledge of,” said Feldman. “Nobody is going to stop me this time.”

But the only person currently stopping Feldman revealing those names is Feldman, and he is doing so in order to raise millions of dollars for a commercial movie about his abuse.

Kelly was similarly incredulous about this. Feldman told her he would “absolutely love the pain to stop today.” He then invoked his experience of the Santa Barbara Police Department in 1993 as what was stopping him going to the authorities. He told the same police that Michael Jackson was not a pedophile.

California’s statue of limitations was not on his side, he added. Then he opined that the abuse he suffered was different from the abuse some of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers suffered because they had taken “a deal to go along with forward advances so they could help their careers.” There was an “upside” for these women professionally, despite what they had suffered, in keeping their mouths shut, Feldman said.

Kelly rightly said Feldman was not characterizing the accusers’ situation correctly. Feldman again grumbled he and Haim were “never given an upside.”

“Right now the upside would be protecting other little boys,” Kelly said.

Feldman said he might not wait until the film is finished to reveal the names, but that he was worried for his safety.

Kelly wondered if Feldman named his abuser now, would that not “immobilize” him. Feldman said his name would be dragged through the mud.

Truth was an absolute defense in a defamation case, Kelly stated, which led Feldman to talk about his Truth Campaign, which is aimed at people opening their eyes, and seeing that this is about “good versus evil.”

He proposed a hashtag, #IStandWithCorey, and directed people to his Indiegogo page to donate money.

“Name it, shame it, call it out, it’s time to clean house,” Rose McGowan said of abusers a few days ago. With the help of those closest to him, Feldman may want to consider following her lead, and without the tick-tock toward his desired $10 million guiding him.