Elliot Page is speaking up about the sexual abuse he says he endured as a teenager in Hollywood.
The “Umbrella Academy” star detailed these alleged moments in his new memoir, “Pageboy.” (Some of these passages are quoted below and may be distressing to some readers.)
One section describes an unnamed director who Page says “groomed” him as a teen.
“Stroking my thigh under the table, he whispered: ‘You have to make the move, I can’t,’” Page wrote in the tell-all book.
“On a project not long before, a crew member had done the same,” Page wrote about a separate incident involving another person. “In between takes he would talk to me about art and films, [Stanley] Kubrick naturally.”
That crew member, Page continued, “invited me to hang out on a Saturday afternoon. After a walk in the rain he grabbed me, asserting we go upstairs. Pulling me in to his body, I could feel his hard cock against me.”
Page, who came out as gay in 2014 and announced he was transgender in 2020, did not identify either of the men. He did reveal in his memoir that the alleged incident involving the director occurred during a dinner at a Toronto restaurant.
The Oscar-nominated “Juno” star added the director’s behavior included “frequent texts” and “books he gifted me” that made Page “feel special.” The actor, now 36, went on to detail numerous other alleged incidents in a chapter titled “Leeches.”
Page was filming “Hard Candy,” a thriller about a teenager confronting a predator of children. He was only 17, he said, when a “funny and strange” crew member invited himself to Page’s apartment after filming wrapped, and walked into the actor’s bedroom with “his hands on my shoulders.”
“He laid me down on the bed,” Page wrote. “Starting to remove my pants, he said, ‘I want to eat you out.’ I froze. After it was over, he tried to stay in the bed with me. I had thawed marginally and told him he couldn’t, to get out. He slept on the couch.”
Page suggested in the memoir that his “isolation” and “insecurity” as a teenage actor who was unsure about his sexuality and constantly filming “in new cities, with no friends, alone in hotel rooms,” made him “a perfect target” for predators.
One of the alleged offenders was a woman who worked as a crew member on an unnamed film. Page says she took him house-hunting at the start of production, and at one point, she allegedly grabbed him and forced a kiss on the actor before pushing him to the floor.
“I didn’t say no,” Page wrote, “I did not resist, I just stiffened.”
The author said he downplayed these moments as a “self-defense mechanism” and believed they were commonplace in Hollywood. Page wrote that he rejected the notion he had been abused, even when his therapist suggested as much.
“I didn’t know how to talk to people about it,” he wrote, per BuzzFeed News. “I thought you just get over it and move on. It took me a long time to be able to ... fully talk about these experiences or acknowledge that they were traumatic and had a significant impact on me.”
“Pageboy” is now available everywhere.
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.