Sit-down with Katie Couric is well thought-out, infuriating

Dec 20, 2014 13:05 GMT  ·  By

Stephen Collins, the actor best known for his role on ABC’s “7th Heaven,” is breaking his silence on the scandal that started 3 months ago, when a recording on which he admitted to molesting 3 minor girls emerged online. Embedded below is his first interview since the story broke, in which he does his best to defend himself.

Clearly, in between the leak of the recording, for which he blames estranged wife Faye Grant (they are now in the middle of a very long and nasty divorce battle) and this interview with Katie Couric, Collins hired a PR crisis manager, which you can tell from the way he chooses to word his answers.

Moreover, he’s trying to paint himself into a victim as well and to downplay his actions by saying he’s not a pedophile but an occasional exhibitionist who had a “disruption in [his] thinking.”

The facts, as we know them

On the recording, Collins admits to molesting 3 children aged 10 to 14, and a total of 5 incidents, 3 of which involved his youngest victim. She is the only one he also ever touched.

The incidents occurred between 1973 and 1994, and he informed his wife about them partially in 2000. In 2012, they were about to get a divorce but were still doing couples therapy to see if there was some way they could save their 27-year marriage.

It was during one of these therapy sessions that Collins owned up to what he’d done, and Faye recorded him without his knowledge. The audio emerged online this year, and Collins tells Couric that since she’s the only one who had it and since she’d already tried to use it as leverage in the divorce, he’s convinced that she leaked it to the press.

Collins is no pedophile, he was just misguided

This is the argument that the disgraced actor tries to build with his answers to Couric’s question. He says that he’s not a pedophile because “he does not fit the profile,” and that he never derived any kind of pleasure from what he did.

Asked why he did it then, he explains that he’s probably just an exhibitionist who could not resist the urge to do so. It was an impulse thing, he adds, even though it happened 5 times (or so he says).

He explains that this was probably “a power thing” derived from his need to be accepted: being the youngest of 3 boys, Collins found out from his mother when he was small that his parents had wanted a girl instead of another boy. So he never quite felt loved, apparently.

Collins is a victim too

There’s something else that might have contributed to his “disruption in thinking,” which is how he explains his behavior around minor girls: he too was the victim of an exhibitionist when he was young.

Collins doesn’t name the woman who did it to him, but he says she was beautiful and older and he was 10, 11, 12, 13, and that she “trusted” her. He stops short of saying that he molested minors because he too was molested, stressing that this experience shaped him by making him think that exposing yourself to a child wasn’t really such a bad thing.

This and the fact that he wanted to feel accepted contributed to his twisted thinking in those moments when he abused the minors.

Mind the language

As noted above, Collins most definitely hired a PR crisis manager to get him through this interview. You will notice at one point that he calls his first victim, who was 10 at the time, a “young woman,” thus making the distinction between “child” and “woman.” If she’s not a child, then what he didn’t won’t seem that bad.

He only rarely uses the word “victim” and refers to the girls as “young women.” It is “out of respect for these young women” that he’s still in therapy today, 20 years after the last incident, not because he really needs it – because the urges are not there anymore, he stresses.

He tries to downplay his actions by choosing less impacting terms and using semantics to his advantage: not a “pedophile” but an “exhibitionist,” “disruption in thinking” for the gesture of making a 10-year-old touch him inappropriately, and the list could go on.

At the end of the day, this is a guy who is trying to use fancy words to explain why he conducted himself in a very inappropriate manner around kids as young as 10. There’s no sugarcoating that.

Stephen Collins on Katie Couric special (7 Images)

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