NEWSCarl Lentz's Alleged Mistress Details Their 5-Month Affair: 'We Were Obsessed'
Pastor Carl Lentz's life fell apart when he was fired from the Hillsong megachurch for "moral failures," and now Lentz’s alleged mistress is speaking out about their five-month affair.
"I’m here to tell the truth," Ranin Karim, told The Post. "And maybe by doing that, other people will have the courage to speak up too."
The 34-year-old recalled that she met Lentz on a Friday in May at Williamsburg’s Domino Park when she was looking for somewhere to sit. Lentz offered her his circle, and they left the park together. The Palestinian beauty initially thought he was single.
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The next day, he asked her to save him a circle in the park, she claimed. "When I saw him, he asked me so many questions," she said and told her he worked with celebrities. (Lentz is known for his friendship with Justin Bieber.) She asked if he was married the second time they saw each other, and he said yes, but she didn’t know who he was yet.
She paid an app to do a background check based on his phone number and “everything came out.” She then realized she saw him almost a decade prior at the church when a friend took her following her divorce.
That same weekend, he came to her house, and they drank together, she claimed. "We were sitting and he asked if he could put his hand on my thigh. It was awkward, he didn’t know how to act at first. He was timid, acting like he was a virgin," she said.
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She claimed he told her, "The most beautiful women come from the Middle East." They began texting and FaceTiming often and saw each other every other week at her home but would argue a lot.
He would allegedly speak about how "amazing" his wife was and how guilty he felt about the ordeal. "He kept saying that we didn’t plan this, that this is life and we fell into it," she said.
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"I kept walking away," she said, but "he never knew how to say bye."
Ranin said he referred to her as his "Middle Eastern unicorn woman" and said she reminded him of the Kardashians, which she didn't appreciate. "I don’t like when people drop names," she said.
"He’s a professional narcissist" and "lies too much," she added.
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By September, they saw each other twice a week and were "obsessed with each other."
"He was like a drug to me. I was a drug to him," she said.
But everything came crashing down when his wife and his job saw their texts on his phone. "All his messages are linked from the iCloud," she said, and someone from Hillsong saw them on his computer. "He’s not really a good cheater."
They spoke until last Thursday, November 5, following his Instagram post, where he acknowledged that he cheated on his wife.
According to Ranin, he said his "life is over," and "I usually am the one who is helping couples who are cheating, and now I’m in their shoes."
Ranin thinks their relationship only began because of the pandemic. "He hadn’t been doing anything for so many months, he hadn’t been onstage, what else was going on in his life? He needed to do something that would excite him," she said. She also thinks that a mid-life crisis might be to blame and getting into a "fiery relationship" after a "stagnant relationship" was enticing to him.
She said that "people like him shouldn’t preach" following his actions, adding that Hillsong "seems like it’s a cult."
