Before it all came crashing down, Marc Collins-Rector had convinced almost everyone that he was a visionary. By 2000, he had raised millions for a precursor to YouTube, called Digital Entertainment Network, or DEN, with the pioneering idea to distribute video entertainment not through theaters or television but on the Internet. The company produced its own content, as Netflix does now, and Collins-Rector even patented a video advertising method that Google has used for its own advertising efforts. With corn-silk hair and a wide smile, Collins-Rector was charismatic, people who knew him said. Some called him a “genius.” Indeed, Collins-Rector might today be a Silicon Valley titan if not for one thing: his fascination with young and often underage men.
Brock Pierce acting the film First Kid in 1996.
Buena Vista Pictures / courtesy Everett Collection
Running his business out of a Los Angeles mansion, he and his two business partners — his boyfriend at the time, Chad Shackley, and former child star Brock Pierce, who is now a board member of the Bitcoin Foundation — hosted lavish parties attended by Hollywood’s gay A-list. Their guests included relative newcomer Bryan Singer, now the director of the X-Men movies, and legendary media mogul David Geffen, both of whom were investors in DEN. It was at those parties that Collins-Rector and others allegedly sexually assaulted half a dozen teenage boys, according to two sets of civil lawsuits, the first filed in 1999-2002 and the second this year.
The second set of suits has rocked Hollywood. The new complaints targeted Singer and three other prominent film industry figures, all of whom were investors in DEN. Singer and the other defendants in the ongoing lawsuits deny wrongdoing and have filed motions to have the complaints dismissed. Geffen was not accused of any misconduct in the suits nor named as a defendant. His attorney said that Geffen on occasion was a guest at parties given by DEN investors but recalls no one at them who appeared to be under age.
Missing from all the coverage of the Singer scandal has been the man who was at the very heart of it: Collins-Rector. Last seen publicly in 2007 in London, he managed to disappear.
Today, BuzzFeed has learned, the man who once raised at least $24 million for his video-streaming startup lives alone and infirm in a European port city, his apartment crammed with computers. In a recent Kickstarter bid, he raised a mere $12 — which he donated himself.
Collins-Rector — who was born Mark John Rector in 1959, changed his name in 1998 to Marc Collins-Rector, and today goes by Marc Collins but sometimes also uses pseudonyms such as Morgan Von Phoenix — slammed the door on a BuzzFeed reporter and did not respond to numerous other requests for an interview.
In the course of his long unraveling, Collins-Rector pleaded guilty in a U.S. District Court to transporting minors across state lines for the purpose of sex, was allegedly tortured in a Spanish prison, and self-published the first chapter of a science fiction novel that follows the adventures of a beautiful teenage boy charged with leading humanity to its next evolutionary stage.
But perhaps the strangest twist in this strange story is why Collins-Rector fled the country in the first place: He believed that Geffen, his investor and one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, wanted to destroy him.
David Geffen in Los Angeles in the 1990s.
Gary Kaplan Video LLC / Splash News
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