Stephen Collins Called Jessica Biel’s Topless Pics ‘Child Pornography’ Back In 2000

Stephen Collins may be an accused child molester, but he draws the line at child pornography, apparently. The disgraced former 7th Heaven star called out costar Jessica Biel back in 2000 for posing topless when she was underage.

Stephen Collins was 50 and Jessica Biel was 17 back in 2000 when Biel took a number of racy pictures for Gear magazine. As Us Magazine points out, Collins was quite vocal in his disapproval of this “child pornography” when speaking to the New York Daily News at the time.

“The press has gotten Jessica Biel’s age wrong in their recent stories about her,” Collins said. “She’s not 18, as has been widely reported. She’s 17, a minor… And as such, Jessica’s photo spread was child pornography. I don’t want my kid to get the message that that’s okay.”

Fourteen years later, Collins’ remarks on Biel’s photo shoot look like a case of motes and beams.

New revelations about Collins rocked the celebrity news world on Tuesday, when an audio recording emerged wherein Collins apparently confesses to molesting and exposing himself to at least three girls far younger than Biel was when she appeared in Gear wearing little more than short shorts and a come hither look.

The recordings came out of a therapy session that Collins attended with his estranged wife, and in them Collins admits to exposing himself to multiple girls between the ages of 10 and 13. Collins’ wife taped the sessions without Collins’ knowledge.

The fallout from the tape’s release was virtually immediate. Collins was fired from Ted 2, even though no charges have been filed against him yet. A source at the NYPD told The Daily News that not only is Collins under investigation, this is also not the first time police have turned an eye toward him.

“We have an active investigation involving Stephen Collins,” the source said. “This is not the first time the NYPD has investigated Collins. The actor had been the subject of a sex abuse investigation several years ago, but the statute of limitations on the case ran out, so no charges were filed.”

Collins’ lawyer maintains that Collins’ wife, Faye Grant, released the tapes in order to secure millions of dollars more in the couple’s ongoing divorce proceedings.

For her part, Biel long ago said that she regretted taking the pictures that raised Collins’ ire a decade and a half ago. A year after taking the pictures, Biel called the photo shoot “just a really bad decision on my part,” adding, “I got myself involved with people who weren’t thinking about me and instead were thinking about what kind of a story they could get out of it.”