The story of Corey Haim is one of heartbreak. At point in his life he was at the top of the world, but then, his life came crushing down, and it left many of his fans utterly devastated.
Haim was born in December 1971, in Toronto, Canada. Growing up, he was shy, so his parents encouraged him to take acting lessons to help him build his confidence. No one assumed at the time that he would turn into one of Hollywood’s most loved actors.
Following a number of commercial appearances, Haim landed a role in the TV series The Edison Twins. And to him, being in front of camera just felt natural.
In 1984, he had already charmed Hollywood and received a Young Artist Award nomination, which helped cement his acting career. During that time, however, his parents divorced and it had huge impact on him.
Film critic Roger Ebert praised him, saying, ”He creates one of the most three-dimensional, complicated, interesting characters of any age in any recent movie. If he can continue to act this well, he will never become a half-forgotten child star, but will continue to grow into an important actor. He is that good.”
The year 1987 brough even bigger opportunities for young Haim who landed a role in The Lost Boys alongside Corey Feldman. The duo instantly became the definitive teen heartthrobs of the era. The two actors brought their on-screen friendship into their real life and achieved great things together, ending up having their own reality show The Two Coreys.
And just like that, Corey Haim found himself at the center of a global phenomenon, flooded with thousands of letters from fans.
Yet, along with the glamour Hollywood brought came the intoxicating realization that, as a teenager, he could suddenly get away with anything.
A snapshot of Corey’s whirlwind life came in 1988 on his way to the License to Drive premiere. Caught on camera by reporters, the moment stood as a perfect time capsule of what it meant to be one of the defining faces of the decade.
“We’re going to take a shower together,” he was quoted telling his girlfriend Lala “and then you’re going to go home and do your makeup and hair and get dressed.”
Turning to his mom, Judy, he added:
“We’re calling a limo, aren’t we, Mom?”
Next, Haim stopped attending school and became a regular at Alphy’s Soda Pop Club, an exclusive nightclub for underage actors located in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
While filming Lucas in 1986, he started drinking beer, as reported by Mirror, and by the time The Lost Boys was in production, he was smoking marijuana. It seems like it all went downhill for the young actor from that moment on as he soon became addicted to drugs and prescription medications. At the age of 18, he went to rehab for the first time, but it didn’t go well.
“[Haim] had a tremendous saboteur inside of him. And that saboteur he surrendered to. He was living under the spell of his addiction, and he was never able to break that spell,” Dr. Nicki J. Monte, who worked with Haim and Feldman on The Two Coreys, said.
It didn’t take long for Corey’s personal life to completely tank his career. The roles just stopped coming, forcing him out of the industry for eight long years. Between the lack of work and a mountain of medical bills, he was completely broke.
Things got so bad, so desperate, that he actually tried listing his own hair and teeth on eBay just to scrape some cash together. When he finally hit rock bottom and filed for bankruptcy in ’97, it was heartbreaking to see what he had left to his name: an old ’87 BMW, a few clothes, some future royalty checks, and literally a hundred-dollar bill in his pocket.
People finally saw the reality behind the poster-boy image when an E! documentary pulled back the curtain.
It showed Corey living with his mom in this cramped, empty little apartment above a garage in Santa Monica. He was completely out of it—slurring his words and barely making sense in interviews. At one point, he actually showed up drunk, begging for a few bucks just to buy a slice of pizza. And the most heartbreaking part? Through all that fog, he was still recording promo videos to send to casting directors, desperately pleading that he was still “the old Corey.”
But this wasn’t his first attempt at a comeback. He’d been trying to claw his way back for years.
When The Two Coreys got canceled in 2008—mostly because his addiction issues had become unmanageable—Corey did something desperate. He took out a full-page ad in Variety that read: “This is not a stunt. I’m back. I’m ready to work. I’m ready to make amends.”
But he just couldn’t shake his demons. He later admitted that he spent one dark, three-and-a-half-year stretch trapped inside his apartment, completely isolated, watching his weight balloon from 150 to over 300 pounds.
Two years after that ad ran, his body finally gave out. On March 10, 2010, Corey died of pneumonia. Because his place was littered with prescription bottles like Valium, Vicodin, muscle relaxants, and antipsychotics, the police initially assumed it was an accidental overdose. It wasn’t until later that the staggering depth of his crisis came to light: in the single month leading up to his death, Corey had used fake names to hit seven different doctors and seven different pharmacies, hoarding more than 550 prescription pills.
Years following his tragic passing, his friend Corey Feldman came forward with a horrifying claim: that both of them had been sexually abused by men tied to a high-level Hollywood pedophile ring. While Haim’s mother, Judy, disputed the idea of a massive network, she did confirm that her son had indeed been molested by a man during his youth.
To mark a decade since Corey passed away, Feldman released a raw documentary titled My Truth: The Rape of Two Coreys, diving deep into the abuse they both allegedly endured as child stars. The most disturbing revelation in the film was Feldman’s claim that Haim had confided in him about being raped by Charlie Sheen on the set of the 1986 movie Lucas. At the time of the alleged assault, Sheen was 19, and Haim was only 13.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Feldman wasn’t the only one who heard these stories; several others in the documentary—including Feldman’s ex-wife, Susannah Sprague—confirmed that Haim had confided in them about the abuse as well.
Sheen’s team fired back immediately. His publicist released a statement to People, calling the accusations “sick, twisted, and outlandish,” adding that they “never occurred. Period.” The statement urged the public to “consider the source” and look at the denials from Haim’s own mother.
This wasn’t the first time Sheen had to defend himself against these specific allegations. He had previously denied similar claims back in 2017 after the National Enquirer published a report featuring actor Dominick Brascia. Sheen actually sued the tabloid for defamation, a lawsuit that both parties eventually settled in 2018, the same year Brascia passed away.
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