EXCLUSIVE
Home and Away child star Felix Dean is back behind bars, continuing a sad downfall he says can be traced back to taking illegal drugs while working on the soap opera as a teenager.
Dean, who considers the early fame he found on television a ‘double-edged sword’, began smoking cannabis at 14 and moved onto injecting meth a year later.
He has already served jail time for a string of bizarre offences committed across Sydney in 2020 and 2021 and for the fourth time has found himself refused bail.
Dean has been charged with three counts of common assault and one of assault with intent to rob and is now in Junee Correctional Centre in the NSW Riverina district.
The 26-year-old, who has been diagnosed with experiencing a major depressive order, PTSD and drug-induced psychosis, has pleaded not guilty to every charge.
Police alleged Dean assaulted two men and a woman at Newtown in Sydney’s inner-west between 9pm and 9.15am on April 30.
He is also accused of assaulting a man with intent to rob him at Botany in the city’s south between 8.25pm and 8.35pm on May 28.
Dean was just ten when he got his big break on Home and Away, going on to act alongside Ada Nicodemou as her on-screen son VJ Patterson from 2007 to 2014.
He was nominated for Best Young Actor at the 2008 and 2009 Inside Soap Awards but has not had an acting credit since leaving the show when he was replaced by Matt Little as a 17-year-old.
In the past two years Dean has had a 37-day stint in rehab and repeatedly been arrested for offences which have seen him spend more than 15 months in jail.
In October last year Dean had been out of prison for a few months when he ran into the father of a school friend on Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, and demanded $300.
Dean, who was homeless at the time, told the man his son owed him that specific amount and grabbed his arm, saying: ‘You need to give me money now’.