Lauren Sarner
He’s far from heaven.
Disgraced former “7th Heaven” star Stephen Collins has been photographed for the first time in five years.
New photographs obtained by the New York Post show the actor in Iowa on Monday. He was previously married to actress Faye Grant, with whom he has an adult daughter, but after he confessed to sexual misconduct, they separated in 2012 and divorced in 2015.
Collins, 76, starred on the WB series for 11 seasons, from 1996 to 2007. He played Reverend Eric Camden, who lived in the fictional town of Glen Oak, California. Together with his wife Annie (Catherine Hicks), he had seven children, including Matt (Barry Watson), Simon (David Gallagher), Mary (Jessica Biel), Lucy (Beverley Mitchell), Ruthie (Mackenzie Rosman) and twins Sam and David (played by quadruplets Lorenzo, Myrinda, Nikolas, and Zachary Brino).
It was a wholesome family drama that was a compatriot of seminal shows like “Dawson’s Creek,” and it launched Jessica Biel.
But, a shadow was cast over it in 2014, when it was revealed that Collins had inappropriate sexual contact with three minors from the 1970s to the 1990s.
The star was being investigated by the NYPD’s Special Victims Division after he was allegedly taped admitting to sex crimes involving three underage girls, law-enforcement sources told Page Six in 2014.
“There is a formal complaint on file and the incident is being investigated,” a police source said at the time.
After this information came to light, “7th Heaven” reruns were pulled from most networks.
Pamela Shae, the show’s executive in charge of casting said, “I was very, very shocked … I didn’t see [the scandal] coming.”
In 2015, the niece of a woman who lived next door to Collins spoke out and said Collins exposed himself to her repeatedly when she was 13 years old.
April Price, now a 44-year-old wife and mother in Oklahoma, said she first met the “7th Heaven” actor when she visited her aunt’s Los Angeles home in 1983.
“I was visiting my aunt,” Price told the DailyMail. “She was an executive producer in Los Angeles. She lived in a walled-in, gated community of apartment complexes and her apartment was kitty corner to Mr. Collins.
She continued: “One day I was in kitchen cooking breakfast and I look up and I see Mr. Collins walking through the courtyard, right in front of my aunt’s big bay window,” Price told the publication. “He was completely naked. He had no clothes on whatsoever.”
The NYPD and LAPD both launched separate investigations into Collins in 2012, while the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department looked into a third sexual abuse incident in 2014.
Collins admitted to the sexual abuse of three underage girls from 1973 to 1994, but was not criminally charged.
Series creator Brenda Hampton told Life & Style in 2017 that she would want to include Collins if there was ever a show reunion.
Hampton said of the hypothetical reunion, “I would include [Collins]. I think all the actors would like to do a reunion show. It would be really fun!”
Hicks, who played his on-screen wife Annie Camden for 11 seasons, told paparazzi in Sept. 2016 she would do a reunion if Collins’ character were killed off.
This post was originally posted by NYPost
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