Corey Feldman needs $10 million. He knows how that sounds, but he promises it’s actually a conservative figure, considering what he plans to do with the money.

Feldman wants to make a feature film that exposes the people in Hollywood that he says have been abusing child actors for decades—including, at one point, Corey Feldman. He wants to direct and distribute it himself. He also wants to hire legal counsel and armed guards to protect him at all times, because the people he claims to be up against are allegedly major power players in Hollywood and beyond. They’ve already tried to tarnish his career—even tried to kill him, Feldman claims.

But he’s not really afraid anymore. He’s never had a normal life anyway. He’s Corey Feldman.

“I’ve had so much pain, so much anguish, and so much abuse in my life that most people probably would be dead,” the former child star tells Vanity Fair. “There’s so many times that I tried to kill myself as a child, so many times that I attempted suicide, so many times that I would sit there and wish and pray that somebody would just come by and knock me off. I used to think horrible thoughts all the time, because I didn’t believe that I was worth existence. I really didn’t. I couldn’t understand why God kept me here.”

Now he knows. It’s so he can speak truth to power about the people who he says abused him, about the pedophiles who have allegedly hurt so many children throughout the industry. “It’s all connected to a bigger, darker power,” says Feldman. “I don’t know how high up the chain that power goes, but I know that it probably is outside of the film industry too. It’s probably in government; it’s probably throughout the world in different dark aspects.”

After numerous women accused Harvey Weinstein of harassment and assault at the beginning of October, speaking up about sexual misconduct in Hollywood has become an odious but necessary near-daily event. Many more big-name players have been accused by multiple people of abusing their power: Brett Ratner, Kevin Spacey, Roy Price. And as the dominoes continued to fall, people starting paying attention to Corey Feldman again, asking him to finally name the alleged abusers he’s been alluding to for years, the secret sexual predators he says prey on child actors. Feldman mentioned one, Martin Weiss, by name in his 2013 memoir, Coreyography, and used an alias, Ron Crimson, for another. But hasn’t named more, because he’s wary of retaliation.

In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, Feldman made an unorthodox decision. He didn’t want to go to the police; he says he did so once, in Santa Barbara in 1993, and the authorities did nothing. The Santa Barbara Police Department disputes his claim, saying its records “do not indicate that he named any suspects.”

This time, Feldman plans to make a movie based on his book, focused on the allegations. He plans to name six people: three who abused him and three others who are connected to them. On Oct. 25, he launched an Indiegogo campaign laying out his plan, accompanied by a six-minute video of Feldman explaining what he knows and why a movie is the correct format for this information.

“Legally, it’s a good place to be when you’re doing a movie and you’ve got lawyers and insurance and you’re bonded and all that stuff,” he explains to V.F. “If it’s an independently sourced movie where we’re four-walling the theaters and we’re buying out the theater space and we’re projecting it ourselves, then they can’t stop us.”

He raised $100,000 his first day. Two weeks later, he’s got around $220,000, which is a bit below where he wanted to be at this point. “We have 4,500 supporters right now—we could use about 45,000,” Feldman says with a laugh. The support has mainly come from strangers who have been galvanized by his decision to take action—not, he notes, from major Hollywood figures. “It seems like 95 percent of this industry is pretending that this issue does not exist.”

In reality, Feldman swears, “hundreds” of people in the industry already know who the predators are; sharing their names should not be his sole responsibility. But Feldman has largely been the face of this particular movement, because he’s the one making the loudest noise—launching the campaign, sitting down for interviews with Matt Lauer and Megyn Kelly. He’s been vocal about this issue since at least 2011, when Feldman sat down for a interview in which he claimed that pedophilia was the biggest problem in Hollywood.

On a recent episode of Dr. Oz, Feldman confirmed—without explicitly naming him—that actor Jon Grissom is the man who allegedly abused him when he was a child. Later on the show, Feldman and Mehmet Oz called the police to report Grissom. Shortly afterward, Feldman announced that he had completed a formal interview with the Los Angeles Police Department to share all his information; it has since launched an investigation into his claims.

Grissom has not yet publicly commented on the matter, and V.F. has been unable to get in touch with him. A request for comment sent to his MySpace page, where Grissom has photos of himself posing with Feldman when he was younger, has not yet been answered. According to Dr. Oz, Grissom was previously jailed for child molestation.

A spokesman for the L.A.P.D. confirmed it’s looking into the allegations. Still, there are a few other people on Feldman’s list, people who are even more powerful. “There is one in particular that I’m very worried about that is still very powerful, that is a kingpin in the business, that still has ties and connections to all the most powerful people,” the actor says. “I know he’s protected by another guy that’s got the same type of connections and same kind of power lines. Yes, there is an eminent threat, and yes, they can have me extinguished if I’m not secure.” Feldman doesn’t feel ready yet to publicly name that person.

There’s also another person who molested Feldman, he says, who is “linked to another person that was very much a big part of the studio. That person is now dead.” Those two people, Feldman claims, “pretended to be father and son,” but were actually lovers.

“This does prove that it goes all the way up into the top of the studio system at the time I was a child,” he says.

Though Feldman is composed and driven when he speaks about purported predators, his decision to lob anonymous accusations smacks of paranoia. But he has to be paranoid, he says. Just before Feldman launched his anti-pedophile campaign, he claims two truck drivers purposefully barreled toward him and almost killed him. “It was the scariest moment of my life,” he says. After a recent New Yorker story revealed how far Harvey Weinstein allegedly went to silence his victims—hiring investigators, ordering damning dossiers, and spending at least $100,000 to make his problems go away—Feldman isn’t wrong to be too careful.

Weinstein’s downfall was due largely to a chain reaction: one woman inspired another woman to speak up, which inspired another woman. But few people have joined Feldman’s crusade to explicitly name alleged child abusers. This is not particularly surprising to Feldman: “If a kid is on the set of a movie or a long-running TV show and something happens to that kid on the set, what agent is going to say, ‘yeah, it’s a good idea to go press charges against the executive producer’? None,” Feldman says. “What they’re gonna tell ‘em is you keep your mouth shut, just go along like everything’s fine, because we’re all gonna lose money and you will get cut off. Not only will the show be over, not only will the paychecks end, but you’ll probably never get another job again, which is correct . . . that kind of fear is instilled in families that may be in this business for, let’s just say, selfish reasons.”

Feldman began acting when he was 3 years old and gradually became a bona fide star in films like Stand by Me and The Goonies by age 15. It was during that time that he says he was sexually abused, which led Feldman on a destructive path. He self-medicated with drugs and alcohol, and claims one of his abusers introduced him to heroin. He eventually entered rehab and professes now that he’s been sober for decades.

During his most successful acting streak in his teen years, Feldman teamed up with actor Corey Haim for hits like License to Drive and The Lost Boys. Feldman claims Haim was also sexually abused as a child star, which is something he mentions in his memoir—though he doesn’t name Haim’s abuser. On Wednesday, the National Enquirer reported that the actor Charlie Sheen allegedly molested Haim on the set of the film Lucas. Sheen was 19 at the time of filming; Haim was 13. The Enquirer also suggested that perhaps Feldman was referring to Sheen in his book.

Sheen has since denied the allegations. Our interview took place before the Enquirer story was published; in response to a request for comment, Feldman’s publicist gave V.F. the following statement: “Corey can only speak about his own experiences. He can only attest to events that he actually saw; anything he was told by other victims is merely hearsay. Unfortunately, some of them are not here to recount their horrors and all we can hope is that all abusers are held accountable.”

At the moment, there are a few things that would convince Feldman to drop his movie campaign and publicly reveal the names on his list: a major legal counsel offering free services, free armed guards, and vocal support from powerful people in the entertainment industry. He doesn’t have any of those yet—but he’s not feeling sorry for himself. “It’s time to heal those old wounds,” he says, “and move forward.”