Felix Dean, a former child actor on Home and Away, is back in jail, continuing a sad downward spiral that, in his words, can be linked to using illegal substances while he was a teenager and performing on the soap opera.
Dean, who views his early success on television as a “double-edged sword,” started using marijuana when he was 14 years old and switched to injecting meth a year later.
For a series of odd incidents committed throughout Sydney in 2020 and 2021, he has previously served time in prison, and for the fourth time, he is being denied bail.
Dean is currently being held at Junee Correctional Centre in the NSW Riverina district on three counts of common assault and one count of assault with the intent to rob.
The 26-year-old has entered a not guilty plea to all charges despite having been diagnosed with a serious depressive disorder, PTSD, and drug-induced psychosis.
On April 30 between 9 p.m. and 9.15 a.m. in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Newtown, Dean is accused by police of assaulting two men and a woman.
Additionally, between 8.25 and 8.35 on May 28 at Botany in the city’s south, he is suspected of attacking a man with the purpose to rob him.
Dean made his acting debut on Home and Away at the age of ten. From 2007 to 2014, he costarred as Ada Nicodemou’s on-screen son VJ Patterson.
He was nominated for Best Young Actor at the Inside Soap Awards in 2008 and 2009, although he hasn’t received an acting credit since leaving the programme at the age of 17, when Matt Little took his place.
Dean has spent 37 days in rehab over the previous two years and has been detained numerous times for offences that have resulted in more than 15 months in prison.
Dean confronted the father of a school buddy on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst in October of last year after being released from prison for a short while and demanding $300.
When the dad told Dean his son owed him that particular sum, Dean, who was homeless at the time, grabbed his arm and said, “You need to give me money now.”
When Dean appeared before Waverley Court in April of this year, he admitted to common assault and intimidation and was given an 11-month prison term with a five-month minimum.
Dean violated the community corrections orders that had been placed on him in January of last year for stealing an iPhone and assaulting a police officer because of those charges.
Dean received a two-month prison sentence when Magistrate Ross Hudson overturned the order for assaulting the police officer but did nothing about the other CCO that had been broken.
Dean was released into his patient mother’s care after serving his sentence.
In a letter of apology to the court, Dean stated, “It is not lost on me that my actions have caused great pain to my family.” Mr. Hudson had taken notice of this.
I was addicted to methamphetamine, homeless, and constantly intoxicated, he stated.
He says he realises the need to change the road he’s on, according to Mr. Hudson, who warned Dean that he would not “get on top of things” until he stopped using drugs.
When Dean was sentenced to prison in January of last year for crimes including a “unprovoked,” “vicious,” and “spontaneous” attack on an Uber driver, more information about his traumatic upbringing came to light.
The fourth time in two years that Dean had been arrested, the Central Local Court heard that he had been imprisoned since October 2021 after attacking a tobacconist with a hammer.
He entered a plea of guilty to charges including affray, shoplifting, two counts of reckless property damage, assault with a weapon, assault with the intent to rob, and assault with the intent to commit an indictable offence.
In May 2020, following Dean’s reservation for a room at the Meriton Suites Hotel in the financial area, the first of those violations was committed.
Dean damaged a security gate in the parking lot with his Subaru WRX sedan the following morning, doing $7,624.93 worth of damage.
At that time, authorities discovered Dean had been accused of nine different offences, ranging from larceny to violence. He was receiving $1,000 from Centrelink while residing at an Airbnb.
Early in 2021, Dean had his second significant run-in with the law when he attacked an Uber driver and broke another man’s glass.
By that time, the NSW Trustee & Guardian had been appointed to oversee his funds and was paying him an allowance of $150 per week while he was homeless and intermittently sleeping in hotels throughout Sydney.
In September 2021 at Paddington, Dean had a run-in with the law after kicking a police officer in the leg while disobeying a Covid-19 order.
The next month, just before midnight, he was taken into custody in Surry Hills near the TSG Tobacconist.
After taking a cell phone, Dean punched the shopkeeper in the face before returning to attack him with a hammer.
Attorney Elliot Rowe claimed that Dean had a “quite different and unusual experience” while working on Home and Away because he was “constantly surrounded” by grownups. His early years had been marked by the “double-edged sword” of fame.
According to Mr. Rowe, Dean’s drug use had developed into “a long-standing addiction to quite debilitating substances” and was the cause of “the nonsensical behaviour he was engaging in.”
In order to account for the time Dean had already spent in detention, Magistrate Alison Viney backdated Dean’s sentence to begin in July of the previous year and set a minimum term of 11 months.
Ms. Viney acknowledged Dean had a “significant drug and alcohol problem” and pointed out that he had previously been offered opportunities to address those problems.
She also discovered Dean to be a bright young man who had faced considerable hardships and had been reared solely by his devoted mother.
