Stephen Collins’ Victim Speaks Out About Abuse
Published on March 12, 2015.A woman identified as April Price says she was one of the three girls whom former 7th Heaven actor Stephen Collins assaulted over a 20 year span from 1973-1994, and now she is speaking out for the first time in a very candid and graphic interview with the U.K.’s Daily Mail Online.
Price, now 44, says she met Collins in the summer of 1983 when she was 13-years old and staying with her aunt who lived in the same L.A. apartment complex that Collins and his wife lived in at the time. She stated at first she was very excited to learn Collins lived there because she was a fan of his work in The Tales of the Gold Monkey and when she met him, he promised to get her an autograph.
She explained that he went on to expose himself to her three times over the summer beginning with an incident when he walked by her aunt’s window with absolutely no clothes on when she was in the kitchen making breakfast.
“At the time, I didn’t think it was necessarily sinister really, but I thought it was odd. It was not like he tried to cover up,” she explained and said she also told a neighbor about it who told her it wasn’t a big deal because Collins had just been filming in France where it wasn’t a problem.
Another incident happened not long after however when he was helping her set up an Atari console at her aunt’s place and again exposed himself to her, “I don’t know at what point he did it, but when he turned around, his pants were completely unfastened.”
She said she didn’t know what else to do but “play along” and act “normal” even though she was scared, “Honestly, I was 13 and hadn’t even kissed a boy yet. This was not something I was even remotely prepared for in my life and I shut down… I didn’t want to be rude. He was doing something for me. He was fixing something for me. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t appreciative of that.”
The third incident was the worst; Price says Collins completely undressed while it was only the two of them in his apartment, but luckily she got out before anything else happened.
Collins ended up apologizing to her years later when she was working on the set of 7th Heaven and Price accepted the apology and tried to move on from the incident until it was all thrust into the headlines when a leaked recording of the actor admitting to his acts was released last fall.
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