Laura Lentz recalls the day husband Carl Lentz admitted to cheating

Carl says he felt like he was “in an alternate universe” the day he was confronted by church leadership after a Hillsong staffer found texts on his computer that suggested an affair between him and jewelry designer Ranin Karim and reported him. (Carl has never mentioned her by name while talking about his infidelity, but Ranin told her story a number of times.)

On Oct. 25, 2020, “Carl’s like, ‘Hey, can I talk to you for a second,” Laura, his wife since 2003, recalls in the series, her first interview since both she and Carl were fired from Hillsong. “As soon as he shut the door and I saw his face, my heart just dropped and I was like, I could tell it was something big. I didn’t know what he was going to say, but…when he did, my whole world crashed.”

When Carl told her he’d been “unfaithful,” Laura remembers asking him what that meant and if he was in love with this other woman. And in that “unbelievable” moment, she adds, “I thought about my kids. That was my first thought, then—it was so stupid—but I thought about our church and our staff. 

Carl remembers Laura uttering a sound that “was like no other cry I’d ever heard.” He says that “she wasn’t mad, she was just so broken.”