The Last Pixel Show

Earlier that year, a lawyer named Walter Timpone had filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Trenton, New Jersey, on behalf of a young male client. The suit alleged that Collins-Rector, while he was CEO of Concentric Research, had flown the boy back and forth to Michigan for the purpose of having sex with him; the boy was 13 years old at the time.

As fate would have it, Collins-Rector was served with the papers only days before the IPO plans were made public. Though he and DEN announced several weeks later that the lawsuit had been settled out of court, the IPO was canceled, and not long afterward Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce left DEN. This being the dot-com world, DEN for a while managed to survive even this disaster. For one thing, the employees seemed to take it in stride when the head of their company -- a company that catered to a young audience -- was branded as an alleged pedophile. A board member made it clear that management, too, was unconcerned, more interested in money than in morals. Marc Nathanson, who sat on DEN's board of directors, told the Los Angeles Times: "Who people date is none of the board's business."

Daniel S., meanwhile, was spiraling downward fast. After he quit DEN in the fall of '99, his grades had plummeted, and his mood had guttered. He became sullen, uncommunicative, and unspeakably unhappy. At one point, at his parents' home in Upland, the boy sat down to write a suicide note. Daniel's brother came across the note and, fearful for Daniel's life, confronted him about it. And that was when Daniel told his brother -- and soon after that, a lawyer -- about his time at DEN.

"He had nobody that he could go to," says Daniel's attorney, Brian Brandt. "He couldn't tell anybody in his family what had happened to him. He couldn't tell his friends; they would say he was, quote unquote, 'a fag.' He'd be ridiculed out of his social circles. He was going to kill himself."

The story that came tumbling out forms the basis of a legal complaint that Brandt filed on Daniel's behalf this June, in L.A. County Superior Court in Van Nuys. According to the complaint, Daniel was fondled by Collins-Rector, then forced to perform sex with him and Shackley. Daniel claims, too, that he was put on a steady diet of Valium, Vicodin, Xanax, Percocet, Ecstasy, pot, and other drugs to keep him subdued and malleable. "He was heavily drugged," Brandt says, "to the point where he couldn't make his own decisions."

Daniel's complaint says that Collins-Rector hired private jets and took Daniel and Shackley to Puerto Rico, Florida, Hawaii, Las Vegas, and New York. Other young boys allegedly filled the hotel suites that Collins-Rector rented. The complaint also charges that limos were sent to Daniel's home to fetch him to Encino, where Collins-Rector encouraged him to spend all of his Friday nights, and that for about a year Collins-Rector and Shackley "engaged in various forms of sexual abuse on plaintiff, including fellatio and sodomy."

Daniel says that after he eventually had sex with Collins-Rector, he was passed along to Shackley. The two bought him Versace suits on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills; they made cars available to him.

"This kid isn't even gay," Brandt says. "I don't know if he'd even kissed a girl before he met these people. He didn't want this."

Still, the warning signs may have been there all along. Says Brandt: "Collins-Rector mentioned to him on some occasions while he was doing the film job, he said a kind of cryptic, 'You need to learn how to play the game.' He mentioned that on several occasions. My client didn't really think much of it at the time. He wasn't sure what he was talking about."