In Williamsburg’s Domino Park last Saturday, Ranin Karim, the 34-year-old woman who played a small but significant role in the downfall of one of America’s most famous pastors, sat overlooking the East River. Five months earlier, just a few social distancing circles over, she had met Carl Lentz, the former pastor of the celebrity-friendly Hillsong Church. It was easy to envision: Tall and elegant, she’s a striking figure even in New York City. Sitting with her, you get the sense that she’s used to fending off advances from strangers.
She says she never intended to speak publicly about her affair with Lentz, who was fired from his position on November 4 due to “leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures,” according to the church’s global senior pastor Brian Houston. But Karim was blindsided by the statement Lentz put on Instagram the next day, confessing to being “unfaithful in my marriage.” “I was hurt, yeah,” Ranin said. “I wanted to speak my part.”
Hillsong, a megachurch founded in Australia in 1983 that now counts 150,000 members worldwide, has weathered its share of controversies over the years, from its stance on gay marriage to allegations that Houston covered up his father’s history of sexually abusing children. But Lentz’s firing, and the subsequent investigation into the church’s New York City branch, has brought a new level of scrutiny—both for Lentz’s behavior, but also the high-profile circumstances around his firing, and what a vague accusation of “leadership issues and breaches of trust” might actually mean.“There’s so much gaslighting that goes on,” said Janice Lagata, a former member who was inspired by Lentz’s firing to write a lengthy blog post about her experiences. She said she feels “so angry that they’ve been allowed to do it for so long and if they’re still doing it—it scares me a little bit like how effective the programming is.”
Karim, a Muslim who moved to New York City from Palestine 11 years ago, did not discuss Hillsong much at all with Lentz over the course of their five-month, COVID-era affair. He told her he was married soon after they met, but offered only that he “managed celebrities” for his job. When she pressed him, she recalled him suggesting they meet again, adding “you don’t have to google me.” She finally did a reverse-phone-number search to find his last name.
“I know what I got myself into, but at the same time I wanted to do the right thing and walk, walk away,” Karim said. “I am not a monster.” She says she offered him multiple opportunities to end the relationship, but he would always come back, messaging her “save me a seat on my favorite couch” and arriving with a bottle of tequila, which became a shared ritual. He sent her messages like “You are spectacular. Your visible beauty is not really close to how special, how beautiful your soul is…” In one text he called her the “unicorn alien woman, whom I’m forever glad I met!” (Lentz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Karim studied at the Fashion Institute, and is in the process of applying for U.S. citizenship. She’s been married and divorced, and is a jewelry designer and runs her own fashion company Wahidon, which, in Arabic, means “one.”
“People get intimidated by her, her beauty,” says a friend from childhood. “She’s one of a kind, she’s not trying to be a model, not trying to be an actress, she’s not trying to get rich, she’s just crazy-beautiful.” He continued, “She’s a good person, very honest.”
In mid-September, Karim said, she began trying to break things off with Lentz. On October 26 he came to her house telling her that his wife had discovered their relationship. “My life is over,” she recalled him saying. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. If my wife is going to forgive me.” Karim says Lentz told her he intended to resign from Hillsong. Five days later, on November 1, he sent her a text message after midnight: “I have stepped down/been fired from the Church I gave my whole life to and it’s agonizing but I have to own that… I have and will only have nothing but love for you.”
It was only on November 4, though, that Hillsong announced Lentz had been fired. “I really wish I never met him,” Karim said, even as she acknowledged she had been in love. “I told him that many times because it was just, just like, what’s the point?” But their affair, she says, was not a simple case of a married man unwilling to stick by his vows. “He was very conflicted with his own work,” Karim said about his relationship with Hillsong. They spoke after he had been fired from Hillsong, and Karim said it seemed as though a weight had been lifted. “There is a reason he said he feels free.”
For Tanya Levin, a former Hillsong member and author of the 2007 church exposé People in Glass Houses, Lentz’s fall from grace is shocking, but not surprising. “In his own way, Carl Lentz is a victim of the Hillsong machine,” Levin said from Sydney, near where Hillsong was founded in Baulkham Hills as the Hills Christian Life Centre in 1983. “It’s interesting as well that the focus has been on his ‘moral failures,’ with an exotic girlfriend in the media as a distraction. Why now?”