The director of X-Men, Bryan Singer is in hot water after a federal lawsuit claims he abused a 17 year old boy in Los Angeles and Hawaii where firearms, drugs and alcohol were present.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the a lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Hawaii Federal Court alleging that Singer raped the boy and forced him to inhale cocaine.
The plaintiff is Michael F. Egan III, a Nevada resident who grew up in the Midwest and moved to Los Angeles with his family as a teen to further his acting career. Egan, who is 31 today and describes himself as heterosexual, filed the suit without a pseudonym and his name appears in a press release issued by his counsel. He alleges that Singer and others threatened to make or break his Hollywood aspirations depending on whether he kept them happy.
“Hollywood has a problem with the sexual exploitation of children,” said Egan's attorney, Jeff Herman, who handles sexual abuse cases across the country. “This is the first of many cases I will be filing to give these victims a voice and to expose the issue.”
According to the suit, the Los Angeles parties were held at a mansion in Encino referred to as the M & C Estate, whose residents were Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley, whose younger brother Scott Shackley was in Egan's high school class. Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley were principals of Digital Entertainment Network, an early online streaming video company. The complaint asserts that Collins-Rector sexually abused Egan and threatened him with a gun, but does not name him as a defendant.
(Collins-Rector subsequently was charged and pled guilty to transporting minors across state lines for sex, and is a registered sex offender.)
The suit says that the sexual abuse in Hawaii took place at the Paul Mitchell estate. It alleges that Singer supplied Egan with drugs and alcohol, forced him to inhale cocaine, pushed Egan into a swimming pool, later held his head underwater, and repeatedly raped him. These were combined, the suit says, with threats, as well as with promises of employment by Singer.
Singer's attorneys calls the lawsuit “absurd and defamatory”.
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