The ex-wife of Hillsong Church’s first black lead pastor insists his infidelity led to him being extorted by a trans-identified male prostitute, to whom she claims he paid $10,000 to keep quiet, even though he denies being unfaithful during his marriage.
During an interview on the “Girls Gone Bible” podcast in October, Toni Collier revealed that her ex-husband, Sam Collier, told her he was being extorted by a trans-identified prostitute months before she announced she was getting a divorce in 2023.
Toni Collier, who married Sam Collier in 2015, claimed she discovered her ex-husband had a pornography addiction and was paying women for sexual favors during the second year of their eight-year marriage, which was well before he was announced as Hillsong Church’s first black lead pastor in the U.S. in 2020.
“Our second year of marriage, I found out he had a porn addiction. He was hiring women for sexual favors, y’all. And then I would say I just was really isolated, and I was nervous to tell my parents and my friends, and then I didn’t want to go through another divorce,” she revealed.
She said she tried to fix her marriage and assumed that conditions had been improving until 2023, when Pastor Collier told her he was being extorted.
“Two years ago, I was in Nashville filming with TBN, and I got a call from him that he was being extorted by a prostitute ’cause he never stopped. I thought he did,” Toni Collier recalled.
“Long story short, he hired someone; it was transgender prostitute. … I guess they got a video of him. And so they were using this video to extort him, and he sent like $10,000. And then they threatened to come to our church because we had planted a church. We planted Hillsong Atlanta.”
Sam Collier, who now leads Christian Cultural Center Atlanta, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Christian Post on Thursday, but a report he made to the Atlanta Police Department on Sept. 24, 2023, backs up the extortion allegations made by Toni Collier.
The police report does not confirm that Sam Collier paid any money to the prostitute, but the pastor says of the transgender prostitute, “He has already stolen money from me.”
“I am being harassed and threatened by a transgender man extortionist by phone. He does this to men and women across the country in exchange for money. Threatening blackmail and showing up to my place of business to harass me,” Sam Collier stated in the police report. “He makes up lies and false stories and threatens to spread them in exchange for money.”
Toni Collier also repeated the claims of infidelity against her ex-husband during a recent episode of Christian rapper Lecrae’s “The Deep End” podcast. The twice-divorced mother of two, who published her latest book, Don’t Try This Alone: How to Build Deep Community When You Want to Hide from Your Pain, blamed herself for not speaking up the first time she learned about her ex-husband’s activities.
“It was my fault that I did not say anything when I first found out,” she told Lecrae.
“I cried a lot, but I was so afraid to leave and be alone again. … I just was like, I’m just not going to say anything,” she decided at the time.
“I was so scared to have a strong opinion that I was like, ‘Well, I mean, it’s whatever you think, though. Like I understand. I don’t want you to leave me. Like I’m so scared to be abandoned, I don’t want to be alone again, I don’t want to go through another divorce again,’” she explained.
“I think for me, not having the strength and the confidence to say ‘No, we have to go and heal, we cannot.’ Oh, I regret so much. Like when we were talking to Hillsong [about the pastoral position], and they were asking like, ‘Is there anything in your marriage we need to know about?’ And I sat there, quiet.”
Hillsong Church announced in 2020 that Sam Collier would serve as the megachurch’s first-ever African-American lead pastor. By 2022, Sam Collier would announce his resignation from the church amid a series of scandals involving sexual sins and financial accountability at the Australia-headquartered megachurch.
Although Sam Collier did not respond to a request from CP about the latest claims made by his ex-wife, he called her claim of infidelity in an earlier interview with CP a “gross depiction” of their relationship, insisting he tried hard to save their marriage. He previously admitted in a since-removed social media post to trying to divorce her seven times.
“Here’s what I have learned from counseling couples that are in very, very difficult and dire marriages. … In marriage, especially when it’s difficult, you find yourself in spaces and places, and thinking things, saying things, that you come out of your character,” he said.
“I’ve counseled so many couples that have done that. And so, for me, in the marriage, because of the level of difficulty that took place, [I] developed unhealthy coping mechanisms that I’ll leave right there,” he said, noting that he has been to therapy for those unhealthy coping mechanisms. “I can confidently say that the claims of infidelity and what that communicates is very inaccurate.”
In his interview with CP, Collier didn’t go into detail about what those unhealthy coping mechanisms were.
Pastor Collier, who met his ex-wife in 2015 when he was 27 and she was 25, said they got married after knowing each other for three months.
Toni Collier acknowledged that she entered a new relationship too soon after her first marriage ended. She shared those details after talking about her life, coming from a dysfunctional home in which she started having sex at the age of 13, and getting addicted to pornography at the age of 8.
She also described her college years as being the most decadent era of her life. When she was 21, she said she “got saved radically” after visiting a church in West Georgia, and she gave her “whole life to the Lord.” She got married to her first husband soon after, but ended the marriage when she was 25 and became a single mother due to alleged abuse.
She framed her second marriage to Sam Collier as a move of “desperation.”
“You get out of a relationship, and now that I coach women on healing, I’m like, I hated to hear this when I was that age, but I’m like, wait a year after the breakup and two years after the divorce, take the time to heal,” she told Lecrae.
Toni Collier also described her relationship with Sam Collier as controlled and secretive.
“When I got into a marriage, and I started to get healthy and realized that it wasn’t healthy that we were so secretive about everything. No one was ever allowed to [come to] our house. We could never be a part of a small group. We couldn’t share what we were struggling with. It weighed on me because I was learning that vulnerability is the currency to healing. And I was like, ‘Wait, but we should maybe tell someone that we’re battling this,’” she explained.
“And there was always just this looming threat of, ‘if you say too much, I’m going to leave you. If you bring people in and tell our business, we’re going to lose everything.’ And I’m just like, I just don’t feel like this is, there has to be another way.”
Toni Collier speculated that many pastors are living with a fear of losing everything if they discuss their struggles, but it is “literally crushing our souls,” she insisted. “And we are looking less like Jesus in the name of Jesus.”
“Honestly, if you were to ask me the question, this second round, what do I feel? Failure or freedom? Freedom,” she told Lecrae, answering her own question.
“I get to tell people about my inadequacies now. I get to admit that I’m broken in areas. I get to talk about the traumas I’ve been through. Yeah. And Jesus has become bigger in my life because I get to say the thing now.”
Contact: leonardo.blair@christianpost.com Follow Leonardo Blair on Twitter: @leoblair Follow Leonardo Blair on Facebook: LeoBlairChristianPost
