Elijah Wood was a child actor before starring as Frodo Baggins in the “Lord of the Rings” series, and now he’s making some bombshell claims about the state of Hollywood.

He made the shocking claim that Hollywood is in the midst of a child sexual abuse epidemic, with affluent and influential industry professionals molesting child actors with impunity, in an extended interview with the Sunday Times.

Pedophiles have been shielded by influential persons in the film industry, according to the 35-year-old former child actor, and abuse is likely still occurring. Wood, who made his first picture when he was eight years old, said that while he was sheltered from assault as a youngster, other child performers were often “preyed upon” at parties by industry elites.

“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,” he says. “There is darkness in the underbelly. What bums me about these situations is that the victims can’t speak as loudly as the people in power. That’s the tragedy of attempting to reveal what is happening to innocent people: they can be squashed, but their lives have been irreparably damaged.”

“If you’re innocent, you have very little knowledge of the world and you want to succeed,” he continued. “People with parasitic interests will see you as their prey. What upsets me about these situations is that the victims can’t speak as loudly as the people in power.”

Wood claims he was never abused because his mother, Debra, stood by him and he “never went to parties where that kind of thing was going on.”

This isn’t the first time someone has made such a claim. Cory Feldman, a former child star who played in Gremlins and The Goonies in the 1980s, said he was surrounded by abusers who “leched around like vultures” when he was a teenager. After that, the actor struggled with mental health issues, alcoholism, and drug addiction.

The author of the Sunday Times article, Oliver Thring, digs into the history of pedophilia in Hollywood, quoting Corey, who gave an honest account of the abuse he had observed as a young actor in 2011, on the front page of the Sunday Times’ News Review section yesterday.

“The No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is—and always will be—pedophilia,” Feldman claimed, adding that he was “surrounded” by molesters by the age of 14.

The piece also has an in-depth interview with Anne Henry, co-founder of the BizParentz Foundation, a child actor protection organization, who states, “We estimate that about 75 percent of the child actors who ‘went off the rails’ suffered earlier abuse. Drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide attempts, wandering through life without a purpose—they can all be symptoms.”

“We believe Hollywood is currently sheltering about 100 active abusers,” Henry continues.