Stephen Collins has had a history of writing and acting in roles that centered around sexual abuse.
Stephen Collins played a pedophile priest in a recent short independent film that is currently about to start hitting the film festival circuit.
Penance is an 11 minute short film about a priest,who abuses young children. The short film premiered at the Catalina Film Festival on September 27th, just days before TMZ released the audio recording where Stephen Collins allegedly confesses to at least three underage girls.
Also read: Father from ‘7th Heaven’ Admits to Molesting Several Young Kids [Video]
Here’s the movie synopsis:
A man makes the decision to cleanse his inner demons, revealing a buried past that begs the question — can we ever truly find forgiveness and just how far will one go to get it?”
Stephen Collins is best known for playing a Christian pastor on 7th Heaven. Reruns of the once popular 1990s TV series have been removed after the child molestation allegations. The actor has yet to speak publicly on the matter, but he has been fired by his talent agency, Scandal, and resigned from the SAG-AFTRA board last week.
Also read: 7th Heaven’s Stephen Collins Fired from ‘Scandal’
In a surprising twist, in 1996 Stephen Collins also starred in the Lifetime movie The Babysitter’s Seduction in which he has an affair with his children’s babysitter, played by a teenaged Keri Russell. The actor also wrote two erotic novels, Eye Contact and Double Exposure. Recently, Gawker examined his romance novels and had reported that the plot lines in the romance novels coincide with the recent sexual abuse accusations.
Also read: Stephen Collins’ Lawyer Blames Wife for Leaking the Confession
Eye Contact is told from the perspective of a struggling actress in New York named Nicolette “Nick” Stallings, who—beyond not seeming to be a very good actress—is in a constant state of mental duress, continually at grips with an internal struggle to expose her naked body to others.
The character’s predilection would square with the accusation made by a woman who stayed with Collins and his wife in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who claimed Collins would enter her bedroom with nothing but a towel on before exposing himself and molesting her.
This paragraph, from page 172, in which Nick recalls her earliest sexual experience, is especially unsettling to read now. “During her emerging swanhood, she discovered a power previously unimagined. She experienced the effect of removing her clothes in front of the opposite sex. It became her deepest secret.” [Gawker]
It’s also worth noting that when Jessica Biel, eager to shed her wholesome daughter image, posed topless for the cover of Gear magazine in 2000, Collins got upset and called those photos “child pornography.”
