Gospel star Marvin Sapp has revealed that despite his lifelong devotion to the Church, he has a history of drugs and liquor.
“After my mother and father divorced, I started smoking marijuana every day when I was 12,” the pastor and singer told Vidak For Congress.
“I started drinking and taking pills at 16 and snorted my first line of cocaine at 18.”
The star said that as a teenager in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he went through some “big struggles” and “really rebelled.”
And he told us that the five friends he experimented with drinking and drugs with are all now dead or serving long prison terms.
“One of my friends is now an alcoholic, one of my friends is still on crack,” he said. “One of my friends is in prison for twenty-seven years for first degree murder and another of my friends died for about fifteen years because he weighed a kilo. [of drugs on him when he was arrested].”
Now the singer’s life story has been made into a movie, “Never Would Have Made It: The Marvin Sapp Story.”
“I’ve always sung gospel music, but [that was] because my mother made us go to church,” he told us, “but just because we went to church didn’t mean the church was in us.”
He said he wants to show the film “to show… that just because someone goes to church, they’re not perfect. We’re all flawed in some form, shape, or fashion. People need to see that, because for some strange reason when they think of Marvin Sapp, people think I’m walking around with a halo, but they don’t know my story.”
The father of three married his childhood sweetheart and manager MaLinda Prince Sapp in 1992. But in 2010, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and died.
But he tells us that he is now ready to marry again.
“I have to get married again. I married a better man than when I was a single man,” he said. “I have been single for twelve years. Marriage is great for me.”
He adds: “My son just got engaged. My daughter has a boyfriend. My little girl, she’s got a guy and I’m like, ‘Hurry up, I don’t want to be left out. I also want to find someone so we can all be booed together.”
“Never Would Have Made It: The Marvin Sapp Story” premieres August 21 at 9 p.m. ET on TV One.