Ranin Karim, the alleged mistress of celebrity pastor, Carl Lentz — has a message for her haters.
Ranin Karim appeared on Good Morning America for her first television interview since making headlines after the alleged affair was exposed.
She says she met the pastor at a park in New York City.
“He didn’t want to say what he does,” she claimed, adding that he would not even give her his full name. He admitted that he was a married man but never wore his wedding band.
She said that after a while, she looked him up and found out who he was.
“I said I know who you are, I’m not here to judge you, but I have a question: is something wrong with your marriage that you’re sitting here with me?'” she said. “He said, ‘No, it’s you.'”
She said after several failed attempts to break it off, he called her last month to inform her that his wife had discovered their affair.
“He called me at midnight and he said … ‘My wife find out. And I gotta go. She saw the text messages,'” said Karim. “I was devastated.”
“I know people [are] gonna hate me, think whatever they want to think, but in the end of the day, it’s my story,” she said of backlash, adding that she never meant to hurt his wife. “I wanted to free myself of what people think of me.”
Lentz confessed to cheating on his wife. He was fired from his hillsong megachurch after the affair surfaced online.
“I was unfaithful in my marriage, the most important relationship in my life and held accountable for that. This failure is on me, and me alone and I take full responsibility for my actions,” he wrote. “I now begin a journey of rebuilding trust with my wife, Laura and my children and taking real time to work on and heal my own life and seek out the help that I need.”
“I am deeply sorry for breaking the trust of many people who we have loved serving and understand that this news can be very hard and confusing for people to hear and process,” he continued. “I would have liked to say this with my voice, to you, in person because you are owed that. But that opportunity I will not have. So to those people, I pray you can forgive me and that over time I can live a life where trust is earned again.”
