10 NEWS People
Dawson’s silver lining
Rosario Dawson admits there’s an upside to her
boyfriend’s withdrawal from the Democratic
presidential race, said Kristen Yoonsoo Kim in
Bustle.com. A longtime political activist herself,
Dawson has been dating New Jersey Sen. Cory
Booker for 16 months; he dropped out of the
Democratic race in January, ending a year of
constant travel. “He’s here!” Dawson says of
Booker’s return to a normal life. The couple is now planning a
vacation to recover from the campaign. “I’ve burnt out before, and
burning out is not pretty,” Dawson says. “And it ends up degrad-
ing everything else you’re passionate about.” Despite the fact
that their political views are simpatico, Dawson, 40, was initially
wary of becoming involved with Booker, 50. She has an adopted
17-year-old daughter, Isabella, and she worried about how the
relationship with a public figure would affect her. “It’s the first time
I felt like I had to be responsible about my choice of love, which
is challenging,” she says. “If you fall in love, you fall in love. But
there’s another aspect I had to consider: what this meant in [put-
ting] a microscope on my family and particularly on my daughter.”
Those doubts have vanished as she and Booker have grown closer.
“In each other I think we found our person.”
Feldman’s one-man crusade
Corey Feldman says that Hollywood has a dirty secret, said
Hadley Freeman in The Guardian (U.K.). A child star in the 1980s,
Feldman had featured roles in a string of hits such as Goonies and
Gremlins. He and fellow child actor Corey Haim were best friends
and frequent co-stars, heartthrobs known as the Two Coreys. Girls
would stand outside their houses, screaming for their attention.
Yet by age 19 they were washed-up, unemployable, and addicted
to drugs; Feldman once sold his CD collection to buy crack. Both
continued debasing themselves on reality TV, and Haim died
of pneumonia at age 38 in 2010. After Haim’s death, Feldman
claimed the real reason for their self-destruction was sexual abuse.
“The biggest problem in Hollywood,” Feldman, 48, says, “is pedo-
philia.” He says Haim was raped by “a major Hollywood figure”
while making the 1986 film Lucas. “He made me promise before
he died that I would get the truth out,” Feldman says. Although
he’s refused to name his abuser and Haim’s rapist, he says he will
in his upcoming documentary Truth: The Rape of the Two Coreys.
Feldman claims he’s been blackballed because of his crusade and
left out of the #MeToo spotlight. He points to an award show that
honored victims, asking, “Why was I not invited?”
Ben Affleck is in recovery from shame as well as addiction, said
Brooks Barnes in The New York Times. The actor, 47, has done
three stints in rehab to deal with his alcoholism, and last fall, after
celebrating a year sober, Affleck relapsed and was photographed
stumbling to his car. “I really wish it wasn’t on the internet for my
kids to see,” he says. But there was nothing for him to do but go
back to AA meetings. “Shame is really toxic. It’s just stewing in a
toxic, hideous feeling of low self-worth and self-loathing.” Affleck
grew up with an alcoholic father, and addiction and depression run
in his family. He drank to escape his own dark feelings. “People
with compulsive behavior have this basic discomfort all the time
that they’re trying to make go away with eating or drinking or
shopping or whatever,” Affleck says. “But that ends up making
your life worse. You do more of it to make that discomfort go
away. Then the real pain starts.” His pain intensified as his mar-
riage to Jennifer Garner crumbled. “The biggest regret of my life is
this divorce,” he says. He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly.
“I have certainly done things that I regret. But you’ve got to pick
yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward.”eyevine/Redux Pictures, Zuma/Newscom, APAffleck’s search for redemption
QSteven Spielberg’s daughter Mikaela is
entering the film business—but in
the adult genre. Mikaela, 23,
revealed last week that she
has started performing in solo
porn videos as a way “to
honor my body in a way
that’s lucrative.” She said
she told Steven, 73, and
her actress mother, Kate
Capshaw, 66, about the ca-
reer change and they were
“intrigued” but “not up-
set.” Their adopted daugh-
ter, who lives in Nashville,
has said she was sexually
abused by a non–familymember as a child and has struggled with
drinking, mental health, and self-esteem.
“I have hated my chest for so long,” she
said. “When I uploaded these first couple of
videos, I realized, ‘This is the moneymaker’—
my large chest.” Although her parents are
supportive publicly, a source told the New
York Post, “they’re embarrassed.”
QJohn Oates isn’t sure how many women
he slept with in the 1970s, but says it was
thousands. “I’ve lost track,” said Oates, 71,
the once mustachioed half of pop-rock duo
Hall & Oates. “If you weren’t a rock star dur-
ing that time, there’s no way you can com-
prehend what it was like.” He and Daryl Hall
avoided drugs, but not groupies; at the time,
Oates notes, there were no camera phones
around to produce embarrassing evidence.
Today he’s remarried and settled down inAspen, Colo., and has chosen to shave his
iconic, bushy mustache. “I became someone
else,” Oates said.
QThe Auschwitz Memorial criticized the
new Amazon series Hunters this week for
the “dangerous foolishness” of fictional-
izing scenes from a concentration camp.
The show stars Al Pacino as a Holocaust
survivor who leads a band of Nazi hunters.
During the opening credits, a Jewish chess
master is forced to play a life-size game with
pieces represented by fellow prisoners; the
prisoners are killed when their chess piece is
lost. “Inventing a fake game,” the Auschwitz
Memorial said, is a disrespectful “caricature”
that “welcomes future deniers.” Hunters cre-
ator David Weil said that he sought to cap-
ture “the representational truth” of the death
camps rather than depict them literally.