Elijah Wood was just eight when he arrived in Hollywood, the blue-eyed son of Iowa delicatessen owners. He had been modelling in Middle Western shopping centres for four years when his mother brought him to California to launch his 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.

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 to 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 Meand The Lost Boys. In 2011 Feldman ­decided to speak out about the abuse he suffered as a young actor. “The No 1 problem in Hollywood was and is — and always will be — pedophilia,” 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 crack and heroin. In 2010, aged 38, Haim died of pneumonia, having reportedly entered 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 per cent 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 $US400 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.”

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 was 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. There is no suggestion that DiCaprio or Maguire was ever a victim of abuse.

Henry felt ill at what she discovered. She began educating other parents 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 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 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 pedophile 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.”

Henzi eventually helped to ­secure Weiss’s conviction after, he writes, “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.

The most explosive allegations of Hollywood paedophilia surround “pool parties” at a Los ­Angeles mansion in the late 1990s hosted primarily by Marc Collins-Rector. He had co-founded Digital Entertainment Network, which generated its own online content — some of it with overtly ped­erastic tones.

DEN attracted almost $US100m 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 are all alleged to have been at the parties but none is accused of any wrongdoing.

At these parties, Collins-Rector and other men are said 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 in 1999, sued Singer and two other men, ­alleging serious sexual abuse. He had to drop this suit after he was found to have contradicted himself. A federal judge 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 pedophile, Brian Peck, was also a guest at the parties. Singer had given him cameo roles in two of the X-Men films. 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.

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 seeing An Open Secret, that may not be easy. 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. It can be found on YouTube.

Hollywood’s reluctance to promote An Open Secret can be contrasted with its enthusiasm for films dealing with child abuse that took place elsewhere.

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 pedophilia,” says Henry. “But very bad people are still working here, protected by their friends.”

Wood says 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 f. .k young girls,” he once said in an interview.

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 ... 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 Sunday Times

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