For All We Know

Every time one of our idols crumbles and falls from his/her lofty position, we're stunned and flabbergasted.

So when the wife of actor Stephen Collins, who for 11 years played Rev. (!) Eric Camden on the cornfest "7th Heaven" TV series, pulled out her surreptitious tapes of his confessions of indecent exposure and liberties with underage women, we shook our heads and said, "Wow!  THAT guy is a perv? What th'?"

His soon-to-be ex is Faye Grant, an actor herself, and she wrote in court papers, "Stephen admitted that he has engaged in a long-term pattern of sexually abusing minor children, including sexually molesting three young girls over a decade ago." And from what we are hearing on the tapes, they are only arguing over how many incidents there seem to have been, rather than whether such disgusting behavior took place at all. Ms Grant says that he said that two of the girls he molested were between the ages of 10 and 14.

To be clear, we don't know if any of this happened, if the tapes are doctored in some way to make Collins appear to be the creep of all time, or if there is some other exculpatory factor.  But police in both Los Angeles and New York (where there really is a Special Victims Unit!) are actively investigating, and there is always this angle to consider:  Ms Grant told the divorce court she has "received letters and a phone call from the husband of one of the victims", who "threatened to bring a civil lawsuit against (her)," and wanted the court to shield her from liability if the victim should sue her famous husband.

She married him and had no idea about all of this.  All of America watched the wholesome Camdens deal with the vagaries of life, not knowing that the man who played the man in the pulpit may have been a roundheel, a mountebank cad in preacher's garb.

It's now the "Night of 99 Stars"

Actors angle for photographs of their "good side," but there is often a bad side of people we think we know well.

Old Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, told Daniel about his dream of seeing a great image in his dream, and the image's feet were "part of iron and part of clay."  That's where we get the expression "feet of clay," because the big iron monumental
likenesses we build in our minds for people who became famous because they are attractive and able to act like normal everyday citizens in sappy melodramas will crumble and topple, sure as every false thing will do.

Mr Collins is represented by the law firm of Crumble and Topple.