Corey Feldman may be remembered as a child star from a string of successful movies in the 80s, but behind the scenes he was hiding horrific abuse and drug use.
Feldman weaves the tale of his difficult upbringing in a new memoir, Coreyography. In it he tells of the typical Hollywood behavior of a young star — drinking, drugs, and sex — but also gives readers a glimpse into the deeper abuse he suffered at the hands of a drug-addicted mother and irresponsible father.
In the book, Corey said that while he was turning in hit movies like Stand By Me and The Lost Boys , his former Playboy model mother was delivering horrible abuse. Corey said she was so obsessed with his weight that she would force-feed him diet pills, and his musician father encouraged his son to use drugs with him.
But his parents obsession started much younger. Corey detailed how his mother forbade him from riding a bike for fear that he might get hurt and lose work because of it.
When he was fired from one role, his mother went into a rage, Corey wrote.
“She’s bent at the waist, ramming the pole under the cotton eyelet dust ruffle… jabbing at my ribs, my arms, my face,” he wrote in Coreyography . “My skin is raw and bleeding. I think that, maybe, she is serious. She really does want to kill me.”
It wasn’t just parents abusing him. Corey’s father hired an assistant who plied him with drugs and then coerced him into sex.
That wasn’t the only sexual abuse he suffered .
“Slowly, over a period of many years,” he writes, “I would begin to realize that many of the people I had surrounded myself with were monsters.”
Feldman also wrote about his friend, the late Corey Haim , who was also sexually abused as a child. Feldman wrote that Haim was bisexual and would often hit on him.
Strangely, one of the few people Corey Feldman said he could trust was Michael Jackson. He said Jackson never touched him sexually during their friendship, but did abruptly end their relationship in 2001. Jackson had heard that Corey would be trashing him in a book and shut him out, despite Corey’s pleas that it was not true.
The book also details Corey’s out of control drug use. At his worst, Corey said he was snorting an eight of an ounce of cocaine every couple of days and doing $300 worth of heroin and crack.
In the book, Corey Feldman tries to impart the lessons he learned to help other show business parents: Get your kids out of Hollywood and just let them be kids.