Digital pioneer Marc Collins-Rector lost millions before he vanished, believing that movie mogul David Geffen wanted to destroy him. Now he's broke and alone — but the sex scandal he left behind continues to consume Hollywood. Update: Details from an official report about Collins-Rector’s arrest in Spain have been added.

Before it all came crashing down, Marc Collins-Rector had convinced almost everyone that he was a visionary. By 2000, he had raised millions for a precursor to YouTube, called Digital Entertainment Network, or DEN, with the pioneering idea to distribute video entertainment not through theaters or television but on the internet. The company produced its own content, as Netflix does now, and Collins-Rector even patented a video advertising method that Google has used for its own advertising efforts. With corn-silk hair and a wide smile, Collins-Rector was charismatic, people who knew him said. Some called him a “genius.” Indeed, Collins-Rector might today be a Silicon Valley titan if not for one thing: his fascination with young and often underage men.

Buena Vista Pictures / courtesy Everett Collection Brock Pierce in the film First Kid in 1996.

Gary Kaplan Video LLC / Splash News David Geffen in Los Angeles in the 1990s.

AP Photo/Nick Ut Michael Egan during a news conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., Monday, April 21, 2014.

Facebook: chadshackley Splash News Chad Shackley (left) and Brock Pierce (right).

After living in London for about two years, Collins-Rector and Bowles moved to Antwerp, Belgium. Together, they often played an online video game called Entropia Universe, according to people with knowledge of their relationship — Bowles using the name “Colonel Lee Bowles” and Collins-Rector under the moniker “Marcus Slayem Aurelius.” They became prominent players, but in August 2007, members of Entropia Universe identified who “Marcus Slayem Aurelius” really was when a picture of Collins-Rector appeared in a U.K. tabloid article titled “Tycoon paedo on prowl in UK.” The vociferous reaction by many other players soon forced Collins-Rector and Bowles out of the game. In Antwerp, a diamond dealer named Marc Robeyns said that he was one of several people whom Collins-Rector befriended in Belgium in hopes they would invest in his stream of startups — and in IGE, which, Robeyns said, Collins-Rector essentially managed from Antwerp. Robeyns, a short, middle-aged man who on a recent meeting with a BuzzFeed reporter sported blue-tinted sunglasses and blue eyeliner, said that he used to serve as the consul for diamond-rich Liberia. But he said he had nothing to do with Collins-Rector’s Liberian passport and that he never invested in IGE. As a merchant of precious stones, he said, the notion of risking money on imaginary goods struck him as foolhardy. Yet the diamond dealer continued seeing Collins-Rector and Bowles socially, he said. At first, their dinners were expensive, with Collins-Rector buying fine wines for the table. But as time passed, Robeyns said, Collins-Rector’s health deteriorated and the dinners became less frequent. The last time they saw each other was more than a year ago. The last company that Collins-Rector appears to have started was Universus Related Holdings, which presented itself as a business consultancy. The principals included Collins-Rector and two Antwerp lawyers, both of whom declined to speak with BuzzFeed. On the Universus website, three people are listed as references, one of whom told BuzzFeed he had never authorized Collins-Rector to do so. The company appears never to have gotten off the ground. A private banker in Antwerp, who asked not to be named, told BuzzFeed that Collins-Rector asked him to invest in Universus, but he declined. The banker also said that Collins-Rector had a small account with his wealth management firm; despite Collins-Rector’s repeated assurances that he would soon bring major assets to the firm, the account steadily diminished. Eventually, the banker said, he closed Collins-Rector’s account. Collins-Rector bemoaned his fate in a profile on a professional networking site. “I continue to try and work on other entrepreneurial ideas,” he wrote, “but the economy has gone (somewhere) and I am both physically handicapped, broke, and friendless so I thought to try this as a way to perhaps make a little money.” Around this time, Collins-Rector used the pseudonym Morgan Von Phoenix to self-publish the first chapter of a science fiction novel titled Change Hope. The story’s titular character is a trans-dimensional entity who visits Earth in the form of a beautiful teenage boy with white-blond hair. Accompanied by two allegorical beings named War and Peace, the teenager uses his supernatural abilities to enlist another teenager — a bullied, reclusive sci-fi fan — in his mission to lead humanity through its next evolutionary steps. Morgan Von Phoenix also created a Kickstarter account to raise $430,000 to produce, under the Universus umbrella, a series of European-centered comics in the Japanese manga style. The Kickstarter campaign ended in July 2012, having raised only $12. Collins-Rector did, however, turn the Universus website into a platform for his prolific writings. In podcasts on the company’s YouTube channel and in blog posts for its website, Collins-Rector wrote musings on politics, technology, and economics. Many were collected in another e-book, this one under the pen name “Anonymous 23.” Collins-Rector’s writings and some of his online activity reflect unorthodox views on adolescence, adulthood, and maturity both psychological and sexual. On Facebook, Morgan Von Phoenix liked a page called “Love Equality” whose banner image includes two embracing figures, a younger-looking one labeled “15” and an older-looking one tagged “21.” (After BuzzFeed contacted Collins-Rector, he closed that Facebook account.) In an article proposing a new model for families and households, Collins-Rector wrote that “the adolescent is subject to, in today's world, the castration of biological reality and hypocrisy of control by other adults until an arbitrary age." “The adolescent” he continued, “is as much an adult (physically able to reproduce and mentally self-aware) as their parent.” During the years that Collins-Rector slipped into obscurity, the idea that he had helped pioneer — streaming video on the internet — became one of the most lucrative and ubiquitous uses of the web. His company was one of a wave of digital video companies that arrived too soon, before the widespread adoption of broadband and other technologies that facilitate video streaming. Geffen’s internet video company, Pop.com, failed in September 2000, not long after the collapse of DEN. Five years later, Google would buy YouTube for more than $1.65 billion. In his later writings, Collins-Rector sometimes styled himself a persecuted tech visionary. In a fawning obituary of Steve Jobs, he rails against the people who “parasitically survive” off of “Visionary Entrepreneurs” — bankers, lawyers, and the like. In an article giving advice to entrepreneurs who make it rich, he wrote: “All those people singing your praises that in the back of your mind you believe may be out to get you (plus all those you don’t know that are out to get you) are out to get you so be paranoid.”

Collin-Rector as seen in his Kickstarter video soliciting donations for a series of comics in the Japanese manga style.