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Vanessa Marcil is an actress who was married to Corey Feldman for four years in the early 1990s. Feldman is releasing a documentary Monday, March 9 titled (My) Truth: The Rape of 2 Coreys, in which he has promised to name names about the powerful people in show business who either sexually abused or helped facilitate the sexual abuse of young stars in Hollywood when he and his friend and co-star Corey Haim were coming up in the business.
Here’s what you need to know about Feldman’s first wife, Marcil, who starred on General Hospital and Beverly Hills, 90210.
Marcil Has Suffered Several Recent Losses
Marcil was born Vanessa Sally Ortiz on October 15, 1968, one of four children of Patricia Irene Marcil and Pete Ortiz. She was the youngest; Vanessa’s siblings include Pete Samuel Ortiz Jr., who was born in 1958, sister Tina, born 1959, and sister Sherry, born 1962. Marcil’s middle name comes from her “abuelita Sally,” of whom Marcil posted a photo on Instagram once.
According to Marcil’s Instagram post when her father died in September 2017, she was estranged from him from roughly the early 1980s until around 2012; her Lifetime Intimate Portrait episode revealed that he was an alcoholic who was emotionally and physically abusive. But they eventually reconciled and Marcil wrote that “we had some great tacos and some great laughs with him in the last five years.”
Then in November 2019, Marcil’s brother died as well. She has shared her grief over both losses with her Instagram followers, writing a message to her father in October 2019 on what would have been his 79th birthday: “He is the reason I have a life long passion for construction, real estate, architecture & the drive to break the chain. Rest in power Pete Ortiz.”
In 2019, Marcil was also mourning the loss of her good friend Suzanne Whang, the host of House Hunters who passed away from breast cancer on September 17, 2019. Marcil herself has had several breast cancer scares over the years, so it was especially hard on her. She found her first lump at the age of 18, she revealed on Intimate Portrait, followed three more over the years. They have never been cancerous, but she has to have frequent mammograms just in case.
2. Her Troubled Childhood Led to Some Jail Time
Marcil began drinking at the age of 11 as a way to escape the pain of her childhood, she told Lifetime. This continued into her teenage years when she started doing a lot of drugs, failed out of high school and then got arrested and spent eight days in jail.
But she said that that might have been the best thing that ever happened to her because her probation officer was constantly checking up on her and her father never hit her again because of that. It helped her turn her life around and she went back to finish high school, which is where she found out how much she enjoyed acting.
“I remember loving it right away because I could be someone else and that was all I wanted, was to be someone other than myself. So I got to be other people and then I got a lot of praise for it,” she told Lifetime.
Shortly after high school graduation, she moved to Los Angeles and floundered a bit until one night when fate intervened and she met global music superstar Prince.
3. She Had a Friendship With Prince
Marcil met Prince at a club one night where he asked her to dance repeatedly and she said no, but then he asked her to trade shoes because they wore the same size and they’ve been friends ever since. Prince is the one who advised her to clean up her lifestyle and she got sober because she didn’t want to let him down.
“I actually felt very overwhelmed when I got sober,” she said. “It wasn’t hard for me to not do it, but the uncomfortable feelings that I felt were there all the time now.”
Eventually, Marcil starred in two of Prince’s music videos, “Poorgoo” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” Marcil also frequently wore a necklace of Prince’s symbol when she starred on General Hospital.
4. Marcil and Feldman Got Married On a Whim
Marcil met Feldman in the late 1980s and they married on August 6, 1989. She doesn’t speak publicly about the union very often, but in a 1993 interview with Soap Opera Digest, she said it was a “whim” and she kept the marriage hidden from her parents for almost a year.
“We were kids. I was 18, it was puppy love, and we thought it would be fun to fly to Las Vegas at 3 o’clock in the morning and get married. Corey was going through his little teen-heartthrob period. His publicist and agent didn’t want anyone to know about [the marriage]. We were legally married for about three years, but it wasn’t a conventional marriage. We never moved in together or really did any of the married stuff. Really, how much of a marriage can you have at 18?”
She went on to say that when Feldman was hospitalized due to drug use, their “relationship took a different turn.” At the time of the interview, which was in July 1993, they had been separated for more than a year, though she said they were “still very close friends.”
However, Marcil has gone on to basically deny the marriage in other interviews, even though they were legally married for nearly four years.
In a 1999 interview with Entertainment Weekly, she said, “[The marriage was] actually a joke we played on our friends. We were messed-up kids, you know? Now that I’m in the public eye, it’s turned into this whole wrong rumor. To say that we were really married is completely not true.”
She also told Maxim in 2005 that she “never married” Feldman, he was “just a kid [she] did drugs with when [she] was a teenager.”
5. Marcil Also Had a Tumultuous Relationship with Brian Austin Green
In addition to Feldman, Marcil has been involved with several other actors over the years. She and her Beverly Hills, 90210 co-star Brian Austin Green started dating in the late 1990s after she joined the show. They got engaged in 2001 and welcomed their son, Kassius, in March 2002. They planned to wed that summer, according to People, but instead, they split up in 2003. When Green married Megan Fox in 2010, Kassius was Green’s best man. Green and Fox would go on to have three sons together.
But there was a period when Marcil and Green had some legal trouble. In November 2018, Marcil wrote on Instagram that Green and Fox tried to sue her for sole custody and asked her to pay child support back in 2006. They lost that case and she and Green have maintained 50/50 custody over their son.
But in the same post, Marcil said that Green and Fox “decided to completely cut Kass out of their lives and his younger brothers’ lives. Kass has never met his youngest brother and is not allowed to know where his bio father, stepmother and three younger brothers live.”
They must have reconciled, however, because Kassius and Green have appeared on each other’s Instagrams several times in the past year or so.
In addition to Feldman and Green, Marcil was involved with actor Carmine Giovinazzo. She and the CSI: New York star were married from 2010 to 2012. The two of them suffered two miscarriages during their marriage. In fact, Marcil has had seven miscarriages, which she revealed in November 2017 when she announced that she and her current partner, a deputy sheriff she calls “MC”, were expecting a baby. That pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in January 2018.
(My) Truth: The Rape of 2 Coreys drops on Monday, March 9 at 11 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT on Feldman’s website. https://www.mytruthdoc.com/
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