Mark Salling Fired From “Gods And Secrets” Movie After Child Porn Indictment

Mark Salling has been fired from Adi Shankar’s Gods And Secrets just days after he was indicted for child porn.

As Extreme Entertainment reported, a federal grand jury indicted Salling last Friday for possessing and receiving child pornography. It’s been said officials found thousands of images and videos on the “Glee” star’s laptop, as well as a flash drive, showing kids, some as young as 10 years old, engaged in sexual activities. He will be arraigned later this week, and faces up to 20 years in prison.

Following Salling’s arrest last December, Shankar said he was considering cutting Salling from the upcoming superhero movie, but only if the “allegations are true.” The director-producer said at the time, “I won’t feed our growing pitchfork culture. I’m going to wait for all the facts to arrive.” Still, Shankar vowed that if guilty, he would “immediately take action” to “remove” Salling from the movie.

But now Shankar isn’t waiting for a conviction or a guilty plea. He says he will pay for all of Salling’s scenes to be re-shot with a new actor playing the film’s lead villain. Furthermore, Shankar says he will donate part of the movie’s proceeds to a charity for abused children. He says in a statement:

“The innocence of our planet’s children is something that must be protected at all costs. As entertainers, our role is to be the ‘conscience of humanity,’ striving to make the world better for future generations. Sadly, we live in a country where statistically at least 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, 80,000 children are reportedly sexually abused every year, and at least 1 in 6 boys and 1 in 4 girls are sexually abused before the age of 18. According to available data, every two minutes, an American is sexually assaulted. Even more troubling, exponentially more cases go unreported as in most situations, authority figures are ill equipped to help.

The aforementioned statistics are nauseating, reminiscent of a third world country, and until very recently, kept out of the limelight. Child abuse is a cultural cancer whose tentacles penetrate far deeper than a single celebrity caught with illicit images on his computer, just as date rape is a is a far more prominent issue than the repeated transgressions of one mediocre entertainer from the 1970s. Child abuse is a democratic disease existing across socioeconomic lines affecting every walk of life. It affects all of us, and more importantly, its existence needs to cece [sic] to exist. Period.

Adi Shankar’s Gods And Secrets will be moving forward without Mark Salling. He has been cut from the mini-series, I will personally be paying for the reshoots, and I hope that Mark finds inner peace. Furthermore, a percentage of profits from the project will go to a charity for abused children. Hopefully some good will come of all of this and I pray that when the dust has settled, the hyper-connectivity of the information age that has brought to light the transgressions of several public figures, will also force us to look within our society to identify and eliminate the root cause of the rape culture we exist in.”

As Extreme Entertainment previously reported, Gods And Secrets also stars Kellan Lutz, Denise Richards, and Jane Seymour, along with two of Salling’s former “Glee” co-stars, Josh Sussman and Max Adler. Salling has not publicly commented on his criminal case, and hasn’t been seen in public much since his arrest last year.