Elijah Wood would like to make one thing clear: He has no firsthand knowledge of child sex abuse in Hollywood. That clarification, issued by Wood exclusively to The Hollywood Reporter , as he finds his name making international headlines for unintentional reasons. During a recent sit-down with the Sunday Times, ostensibly to promote The Trust , a heist movie co-starring Nicolas Cage, the actor took a brief detour when the subject of Jimmy Savile came up. Savile, a famed DJ with the BBC, was found after his death to have been responsible for nearly six decades of sex abuses perpetrated against as many as 400 boys and girls, many of whom were under the age of 10. Wood, said of Savile's victims, "Jesus, it must have been devastating." But he followed that with a more ominous statement, saying: "Clearly something major was going on in Hollywood. It was all organized. There are a lot of vipers in this industry, people who only have their own interests in mind." The quotes have been picked up by dozens of news outlets with stories framing Wood as having coming clean about dark and long-held secrets. But Wood tells THR that his comments have been wildly misinterpreted, and that his only knowledge of child sexual predation in Hollywood comes from news reports and the 2015 documentary film An Open Secret, directed by Amy Berg.
