Vanity Fair is reporting that Lou Pearlman, 53, the creator of such boy bands as *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, LFO, and O-Town, is a pedophile who forced boys into sexual acts in exchange for fame. Pearlman is currently in Florida awaiting trial for bank fraud in excess of $315 million. He was apprehended in June while living in Indonesia where he had assumed a fake name. Page Six says:

I would absolutely say the guy was a sexual predator. All the talent knew what Lou's game was," Steve Mooney, an aspiring singer who was Pearlman's assistant, told VF's Bryan Burrough. "Some guys joked about it. I remember [one singer] asking me, 'Have you let Lou [fellate] you yet?' " Mooney said he once asked Pearlman, who was known as "Big Poppa," what it would take for him to get into a band. "I'll never forget this as long as I live. He leaned back in his chair, in his white terry cloth robe and white underwear, and spread his legs," Mooney told Burrough. "And then he said, and these were his exact words, 'You're a smart boy. Figure it out.' " Mooney added that a singer groped by Pearlman told him, "Look, if a guy wants to massage me, and I'm getting a million dollars for it, you just go along with it. It's the price you got to pay." Phoenix Stone, an early member of the Backstreet Boys, tells Vanity Fair Pearlman was "definitely inappropriate" with Nick Carter. Nick's mom, Jane Carter, wouldn't get into specifics, but said, "Certain things happened and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers...I tried to expose him for what he was years ago."

Wow, this is pretty sick. What kind of a world do we live in when stuff like this happens? All these guys wanted to do was lip-sync and perform their choreographed dance moves on stage, and this guy turns it into something gay. Shame on you, sir.

Here's one of Pearlman's former boy-banders, Justin Timberlake, on Sept. 27th: