With an intimate TV movie about the abuse he and Corey Haim allegedly suffered at the hands of powerful Hollywood executives premiering in January, Corey Feldman says it’s more important now than ever for victims of sexual assault to speak up.
The 46-year-old has been outspoken about the trauma he and Haim faced during their rise as heartthrobs in the late 1980s, penning a 2013 memoir, Coreyography, and helping to produce the Lifetime movie, A Tale of Two Coreys. But he says the hard work isn’t over yet.
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“People are finally listening and there’s a movement happening,” Feldman told PEOPLE. “This is your chance for redemption, but also a chance to have justice served not only for Corey and I, but for the rest of the world. There are still kids out there who are being victimized.”
“I guarantee you that there were other kids that had these experiences. They need to stand up and use their voice,” he explains. “There are producers that know about things that happened on their sets, or agents who know things about their clients, and actresses and actors themselves — it’s time to use our voices.”
The actor added that he’s disappointed that he hasn’t received more support from friends and fellow entertainment industry workers.
“I’m still shattered by the fact that I haven’t had more support from my peers,” he says, before offering his own reasoning of why that may be the case. “Fear is a monster. This is the fear that keeps the secret alive, this is the fear that keeps this whole thing going.”
Feldman says almost “everyone who has done physical harm” to him has been named so far. He also says he finds the motivation to talk about the abuse that he and Haim experienced after a “heart-to-heart” with his best friend a year before his death in March 2010.
“He said, ‘I want my story to be told so if anything should ever happen to me, I want you to tell my story.’ I said to him, ‘Why don’t you just tell your story yourself?’ ” Feldman recalls. “He said, ‘I’m afraid. I can’t do it. I’m not strong, but if I die, I want you to do it.’ A year later he died and I was faced with that certain truth.”
Haim died at the age of 38 in 2010 after a battle with drug addiction and pneumonia.
Since revealing his plan to expose the ring of powerful men in Hollywood who allegedly abused him and Haim, Feldman has named two specific men: Jon Grissom and Alphy Hoffman. Police have also recovered audio tapes of his interview in which he named specific people in 1993, although they reportedly are not looking into the case due to statute of limitations.
Feldman says if police won’t release the tapes, he will.
Most recently, Feldman called out disgraced Today show anchor Matt Lauer as part of the sexual abuse problem in Hollywood, citing Lauer’s condescending line of questioning while Feldman was on the daytime show in October.
“When I sat down with Matt, it was like I was being grilled,” the 46-year-old said. “So much so that at one point he said to me, ‘We’ve been down this road, Corey,’ … I was really blown away. I was taken aback. Where do you get the audacity to come at me?”
“So when this came out that he himself was a predator, it made perfect sense to me,” Feldman continued. “He is the problem. Not him, but he epitomizes the problem. The way he behaved is a perfect example of the hierarchy and the mental abuse, the shaming, the power play of ‘I’m bigger than you’ … that’s what this is about. And that’s exactly how these predators get over on these victims.”
The Lifetime TV movie A Tale of Two Coreys premieres on Jan. 6.