Stephen Collins sat down with 20/20‘s Katie Couric to talk about molesting minors in the past. He told the ages of the girls involved, stated that he never enjoyed any of it, and thus, is not a pedophile, and even claimed that his thoughts about what are appropriate behaviors were distorted by seeing a woman “expose” herself to him when he was a child.
When Katie Couric asked Stephen if he ever felt he was leading a double life, he responded with a definite “no.” “We’re all made of dark parts and light parts,” he explained. “I know that other people are going to judge and doubt, and I can’t do anything about that. All I can do is tell my truth.”
The first instance happened in 1973 when Stephen was 25 and the victim was 10. He says he exposed himself to her twice, and moved her hand to touch him inappropriately while they were watching TV. “I knew that something unthinkably wrong had just happened that I couldn’t take back . . . after about 45 seconds, I took her hand and moved it back.”
He says there were two instances in 1982 and 1984 with girls who were 13 and 14 respectively. He says this behavior was never gratifying, and that he does not have sexual attraction to underage girls. He says he was acting impulsively and doesn’t fit any definition of the word “pedophile.”
“I didn’t walk around thinking ‘Oh boy, I could do something now,’ I’m not white knuckling this,” he says. He also says that there are no other women or children that could come forward with more stories, and that he’s been in therapy and 12-steps programs for decades to deal with this.
“The thing that makes the most sense to me, and it’s not an excuse, none of this is an excuse, but I did have someone in my life when I was between 10 and 15, an older woman, who repeatedly exposed herself to me. And I think that that distorted my perception in such a way that some part of me thought, because I never thought that I was molested, never occurred to me, that word never crossed my mind as a 10-15 year old boy. It was a very intense experience, but I think somewhere in my brain I got the equation of ‘Well, this isn’t so terrible, this person who I trust is doing it.”
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