An Open Secret, Hollywood's Child Abuse Doc, Debuted in Cannes

An Open Secret, the documentary about child sexual abuse, has debuted at Cannes. The film is directed by Amy Berg, who helmed Deliver us from Evil, a film about child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church and West of Memphis, a film about a miscarriage of justice.

Touted as “the movie Hollywood doesn’t want you to see,” the Associated Press reports that Berg’s An Open Secret walks a thin line by only identifying sex abusers who’ve been convicted like Marc Collins-Rector, the convicted sex offender who ran Digital Entertainment Network. It was at his home that some victims, including Michael Egan who accused X-Men director Bryan Singer of sexual abuse in 2014, allege that they were drugged and attacked.

Egan, a former child actor, is also one of the film’s interviewees. He eventually dropped his abuse allegations against Singer, who denied the allegations. Singer is carefully named in the film as merely an acquaintance of Collins-Rector.

Our Gawker colleague Rich Juzwiak saw the film when it screened in New York City late last year and wrote this of Singer’s portrayal in An Open Secret.

The allegations against Singer seem like a distant memory, just months later. Egan, who’s interviewed in the film and provided boxes and boxes of documents that he’d Xeroxed after sneaking into Collins-Rector’s office, eventually dropped his case. Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past was a huge hit, and he’s already at work on X-Men: Apocalypse. Since the allegations, he announced that he is bisexual and having a child with a woman he says he’d previously had a romantic relationship with. Terrific timing.

But consider the company Singer has kept. Consider the fact that he enlisted his buddy Brian Peck to record the commentary for the first X-Men. In 2003, Peck was arrested for lewd acts with a child. He pled guilty to two. He is a registered sex offender.

Starting June 5, An Open Secret will have a limited release in 20 American cities.