7th Heaven, April Price, documentaries, Garth Ancier, Harvey Laidman, Hollywood Demons, Investigation Discovery, Kelley Mead, Kyle Searles, Melissa Henson, reviews, Rob Anderson, Scaachi Koul, Stephen Collins, Tashiba Wilson, Tom Greene, true crime, TV
March 25, 2025
by Carla Hay
Culture Representation: The documentary series “Hollywood Demons” features a predominantly white group of people (with some people of color) discussing various scandals involving famous American people.
Culture Clash: Celebrities often have troubles lives behind the scenes that sometimes are in direct contrast to their public images.
Culture Audience: “Hollywood Demons” will appeal primarily to people who like watching documentaries about celebrity scandals and celebrity problems.
“Hollywood Demons” is one in a long list of true crime documentaries about celebrity scandals and the dark sides of fame. It’s not a groundbreaking series, but it gets the job done sufficiently enough for people inclined to watch these types of TV shows. The scandals in this docuseries have already gotten a lot of media coverage, so the best that “Hollywood Demons” can do is offer interviews with anyone who can provide new and interesting information.
“Hollywood Demons” is produced by AMPLE Entertainment for Investigation Discovery. AMPLE Entertainment was one of the production companies behind Investigation Discovery’s documentary series “The Fall of Diddy,” about the downfall of entertainment mogul Sean Combs. Only the first episode of “Hollywood Demons” was available for review before the series premiere. This episode—titled “Stephen Collins, America’s Dad”—chronicles the rise and fall of actor Stephen Collins.
Collins was best known for playing Reverend Eric Camden (a Protestant minister) on the drama series “7th Heaven,” which was about Reverend Camden, his wife and their five children. “7th Heaven” was on the air from 1996 to 2007. In the United States, “7th Heaven” was on The WB network for the 10 of the show’s 11 seasons. After The WB and rival network UPN merged to form The CW network in 2006, “7th Heaven” had its 11th and final season on The CW from 2006 to 2007.
Collins was born on October 1, 1947, in Des Moines, Iowa. He was the youngest of three sons born to an airline executive father and a homemaker mother. Collins and his brothers were raised in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. He graduated cum laude from Amherst College in Massachusetts. During and after his college education, Collins did some amateur work as a singer and a musician before he settled on being an actor as his main profession.
Collins was disgraced in 2014, when audio recording excerpts from a 2012 marriage counseling session that he did with his then-wife Faye Grant (who used to be an actress) were leaked to the media and revealed that Collins confessed to sexually abusing three girls under the age of 14, in separate incidents about 10 years apart from each other. One of the girls was only 10 years old at the time.
In the audio recordings, Collins described exposing his naked penis to all three of the girls. In at least one instance, he was completely naked when he exposed his penis. And for the 10-year-old, he made her use her hands to massage his penis.
The first victim was abused in 1973, the second victim was abused in 1983, and the third victim was abused in 1994. Collins and Grant (who was his second wife) were married from 1985 to 2015. Their daughter Kate was born in 1989. Collins was married to his first wife Marjorie Weinman from 1970 to 1978 and did not have any children with her. Collins, his ex-wives and his daughter are not interviewed in the documentary.
Even though Collins confessed to sexually abusing girls, Collins was not arrested or charged with these crimes because the statute of limitations had run out by the time this information was made public. However, the backlash against Collins for these confessions was very swift: Collins got fired from his upcoming projects, and his career never recovered. He’s probably living mostly off of any money he makes from “7th Heaven” residuals.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Collins has not had work as an actor in movies and television since 2014, the year the scandal broke. He is described as a former actor or retired actor in recent news reports about him. At the time this documentary premiered on TV in 2025, he was living a reclusive life in Iowa. It’s mentioned in the documentary that Collins is currently living with a woman who’s about 40 years younger than he is. This live-in girlfriend’s name is not mentioned in the documentary.
The abuse victim from 1973 and the abuse victim from 1994 are not interviewed in the documentary. According to the documentary, the abuse victim from 1973 filed a police report about the alleged abuse in New York City, where the abuse occurred, and there was a police investgation. The victim from 1994 never came forward publicly. The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed years ago that it investigated Collins for child molestation in 1994. But no criminal charges could be filed in that investigation, for reasons that the Los Angeles Police Department will not disclose.
As for the abuse survivor from 1983, she did come forward, and she is interviewed in the documentary. Her name is April Price, and she has the most compelling interview in this episode. Although some reports have said Collins abused her in 1982, Price says it happened in 1983. She gives a lot of details, many of which might make some viewers very uncomfortable.
In 1983, Price was 13 years old and living in a small town in Oklahoma. Her aunt Cindy Akins lived in the Los Angeles area, where Akins worked as a producer of TV commercials at the time. Akins invited Price to visit her and stay at Akins’ apartment in the spring of 1983. At the time, Collins and his future second wife Grant lived together in an apartment building next door. In the spring of 1983, Collins was 35 and would turn 36 on October 1 of that year.
It just so happened that Price was a big fan of ABC’s 1982-1983 adventure drama series “Tales of the Gold Monkey,” which had Collins and Grant as two of its co-stars. Price remembers feeling star-struck when she first met Collins, whom she said paid the type of attention to her that made her feel special. She got a photo with him and later got an autographed photo of Collins. Both of these photos are shown in the documentary. In the photo with Collins, he has one of his arms around her, and his hand is touching her hand that she has lifted behind her.
The autographed photo was signed: “April, come out and see us again sometime. Love, Stephen Collins.” In the documentary, Price has this to say about that autographed message: “For some reason, that was weird to me. I thought that was off-putting to me.” It is indeed an odd thing for a man to say to a 13-year-old girl he doesn’t know, says Dr. Drew Pinsky, a medical physician who has appeared in many TV shows but who does not know Collins personally. Pinsky is in the documentary mostly to make withering commentary about Collins being a sexual predator.
Price says her Aunt Cindy invited her for a longer visit in the summer of 1983. And that’s when Price says that Collins sexually abused her. The first inappropriate thing that happened was when Price was home alone in the kitchen, she says she saw him through the kitchen window, as he walked completely naked back and forth in a shared courtyard in the back of the building. Price says Collins knew that she could see him naked, but she was too shocked to say or do anything.
The next time she saw Collins, she was home alone and asked him to help her set up her Atari game system. That was the second time he deliberately exposed himself to her in an illegal sexual way. According to Price, he had his jeans zipper pulled down to expose his penis. Price says she was again too much in shock to do anything. But looking back, Price believes that he was testing her boundaries.
Price says she didn’t tell anyone at the time because of a previous bad experience when she reported being sexually abused. When Price was 4 years old, she was sexually molested by a man who was babysitting her. And when she told certain adults about the abuse, Price says she wasn’t believed. Price thought that because Collins was a celebrity, there was even less of chance of her being believed if she reported this sex crime.
Sometime after Collins had begun exposing his penis to Price, she says that Collins had a creepy conversation with her where he told her that she had pretty feet. When he could see that she looked uncomfortable with this comment, he tried to make her seem like she was uptight. Collins told Price that she needed to learn how to accept compliments.
The third and last time that Collins exposed his penis to her, he lured her into his apartment with the promise of giving her special memorabilia from “Tales of the Gold Monkey.” This time, he got completely naked. Price believes that it probably would’ve escalated to sexual touching, but her aunt had unexpectedly arrived at home, so Price used that as an excuse to quickly leave Collins’ apartment.
But that wasn’t the last time she saw Collins in person. Years later, in 1997, about a year after “7th Heaven” had launched, Price was living in the Los Angeles area and working in the script department for a company that made TV commercials. She was surprised to see Collins at her job. He was there to film something that she wasn’t working on but he was doing some work in the same building.
Price says that Collins immediately approached her for a private conversation to make an apology. “He told me, ‘What I did was terribly wrong. Please forgive me.'” Price comments on this apology: “Looking back, I don’t think it was sincere. I think it was damage control.” Just like Price had done in 1983, she kept quiet about her encounter with Collins in 1997, and didn’t go public about the sexual abuse until years later.
She went public about Collins abusing her after she heard the leaked audio recordings of Collins confessing to exposing himself to a 13-year-old girl in the early 1980s. Price says that even though he didn’t say her full name, she knew he was talking about her because he said that his victim was visiting her aunt, who was Collins’ neighbor at the time. Even though it’s too late to bring criminal charges against Collins for his confessed sexual abuse, Price says it still felt like a relief for her to finally go public, so that people know that Collins’ victims are real and not anonymous.
In the beginning of the documentary, there’s a caption that says the documentarians reached out to more than 100 people who knew Collins, but almost everyone either declined to be interviewed or did not respond. The documentary gives very little information about Collins’ life before he became an actor. It’s noted that none of his female co-stars wanted to speak about him for this documentary.
Only one woman who was a former Collins colleague is interviewed: Tashiba Wilson, a set costumer for “7th Heaven.” Wilson does not have much to say about the scandal and doesn’t make detailed comments about working with Collins. She speaks in mostly generic terms about how the “7th Heaven” cast and crew were like “family,” and she was sad when the show got cancelled.
One of the documentary’s biggest messages is exposing how self-admitted predators like Collins often have different sides of their personalities that they show to different people. Jeremy London and Kyle Searles—two actors who were on “7th Heaven” for a few years—both say that Collins was a role model to them before they knew about Collins’ heinous crimes. They describe Collins as an easygoing, friendly, down-to-earth guy who was generous about helping and mentoring people.
Searles (who had a recurring “7th Heaven” role as Mac from 2004 to 2007) acknowledges that he was very much in awe of Collins. He admits that he was so shocked to hear about Collins being a sexual abuser, Searles purposely did not listen to all of Collins’ confessions because Searles said it would hurt too much. However, for this documentary, Searles agreed to listen to all of the recordings and watch a post-scandal 2014 interview that Collins did with Katie Couric.
The documentary shows Searles’ reactions. Searles is visibly shaken when he gets all the details. He expresses dismay when he finds out for the first time that one of Collins’ victims was 10 years old at the time. Searles says that doesn’t minimize Collins’ abuse of the girls who were older, but it seems that it’s the first time that Searles discovers that Collins did something like this to a girl who hadn’t reached puberty.
London was on “7th Heaven” from 2002 to 2004, when he had the role of young preacher Chandler Hampton. London has had very public problems with addictions to alcohol and drugs. He was fired from “7th Heavenm” but London says he still has great memories of working with Collins. (On a side note, London was also on Pinsky’s VH1 reality show “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” in 2010.) London seems to be more aware of the full extent of Collins’ confessions. However, at one point in the documentary, London says Collins was a father figure to him and that a part of him still wishes that Collins had been his father.
London gets teary-eyed and choked up not when he’s talking about Collins or Collins’ victims but when he talks about himself and how Hollywood has shunned him after he was arrested for domestic violence. (He was arrested in 2012 for domestic violence against his first wife Melissa Cunningham, and in 2018 for domestic violence against his second wife Juliet Reeves.) As for Collins’ confession of sexually abusing girls, London comments: “Stephen Collins would be a dead man if that was my kid.”
Is Collins a pedophile? Kelley Mead, a sex crimes expert who used to work in the New York Police Department’s Special Victims Unit, says he might be, but he is more likely to fit the description of a hebephile: someone who is sexually attracted to children in the early years of puberty, which are 11 to 14 years old. The definition of a pedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. The documentary mentions that there have been no other reports of Collins sexually abusing any additional children, other than the ones he confessed to abusing. Grant supposedly accused him of sexually abusing their teenage babysitter but that accusation was not officially verified by the alleged victim or law enforcement.
Other people interviewed in this episode are those who worked with Collins and say they never saw any indications that he was a perverted sexual predator. These former work colleagues are Garth Ancier, former president of programming at The WB; Harvey Laidman, one of the directors of “7th Heaven”; and Tom Greene, who was a writer and producer of “Tales of the Gold Monkey.” Greene says he first met Collins when Greene worked on 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (where Collins had a supporting role as Captain Willard Decker), and he remembers that Collins made a great impression with his charisma.
This documentary episode mentions that Collins was very skilled at making people believe that he was a lot like his morality-driven “7th Heaven” Eric Camden character. For example, Collins publicly criticized “7th Heaven” co-star Jessica Biel and Gear magazine for doing “child porn,” when in the year 2000, she posed topless (with her breasts covered) at 17 years old for Gear, a publication that was marketed to men. Biel’s role on “7th Heaven” was then significantly reduced until she was written off of the show.
Even with Collins’ sanctimonious preaching about Biel’s controversial magazine cover, he had another side to him as a novelist whose books had provocative sexual content. The documentary says the only other public indication that Collins was interested in controversial sexual matters was when he starred in the 1996 TV-movie “The Babysitter’s Seduction,” in which he portrayed a married father who targeted his teenage babysitter for sex.
Also interviewed for the documentary are culture writer Scaachi Koul, who just repeats well-known facts about Collins and expresses her disgust about what he confessed to doing; “7th Heaven” superfan Rob Anderson, who created a “7th Heaven” fan community on TikTok; and Melissa Henson, Vice President of Parents TV and Media Council, a conservative activist group that objected to some “7th Heaven” episodes that had discussions about sex and drugs. Koul, Anderson and Henson don’t offer any real insight into Collins because they don’t know him and are just outside observers.
Collins apparently kept his crimes so well-hidden, he didn’t need a long list of enablers to help him cover up the crimes. It’s in contrast to the many enablers who are usually exposed after someone famous confesses to sexually abusing people over multiple decades. What this “Hollywood Demons” docuseries mostly succeeds in doing is to show how denial is a major factor in why crimes are often unreported—and this type of denial is more likely to happen if a well-liked celebrity commits the crime.
Investigation Discovery premiered “Hollywood Demons” on March 24, 2025.