Embattled actor Stephen Collins insists he's no pedophile, but revealed to Yahoo News' Katie Couric that he's battled "exhibitionist urges" and boundary issues.
Collins admitted sexual abuse of underage girls earlier this week, following the release of audio from a therapy session with his estranged wife earlier this fall.
Sitting down with Couric, he admits inappropriately touching a minor, but only one time, and linked the incident to trauma he endured as a minor himself.
The 7th Heaven actor, 67, told the veteran journalist that back in 1973, "there were two occasions when I exposed myself to this young woman."
"Several months later, she came to stay with us, with my first wife [Marjorie Weinman] and me. My wife had gone to sleep, and she and I were watching TV alone together."
"I knew that something unthinkably wrong had just happened that I couldn't take back."
Collins confessed to exposing himself to teenage girls in 1982 and another in 1994.
While he laments his "exhibitionist urges" and "big boundary issues," which are undeniable, Collins clarified whether he would call himself a pedophile.
"A pedophile is someone who is mainly or wholly attracted to children," he explained.
"I'm not. I had a distortion in my thinking where I acted out in those ways. But I'm absolutely not attracted, physically or sexually attracted to children. I'm just not."
He also reflected on how his childhood may have impacted his behavior with girls.
"I did have someone in my life when I was between the age of about 10 and 15, an older woman, who repeatedly exposed herself to me," Collins told Couric.
"I tried very hard in the last 20 years to understand," he says, noting that this is still his issue. "I did [this]. I'm not saying, you know, this woman did this, therefore I did it."
Collins admits he is a flawed person, as he did when confessing his dark secrets to his therapist during a counseling session with his estranged wife Faye Grant.
That recording leaked to TMZ, he says, without his or his therapist's permission.
"I kind of went into shock," said Collins, who's been in treatment for 20 years.
"She said 'here's our settlement,'" he adds of Grant, blaming her for the leak. "'You're going to sign it now, or this recording is going to find its way into the media.'"
Grant, for her part, denies leaking the tape to the celebrity gossip website.
Collins says he is sorry, and reached out to one victim, before being advised by his therapist that doing so might do more harm than good for them.
Mackenzie Rosman wasn't available for this Seventh Heaven reunion because she was too busy posing in lingerie and trying to shed her child star image.
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