Randall Terry - Personal Life

Personal Life

Terry's personal life has frequently come under public scrutiny, some of which he has welcomed, going so far as to put his foster children on his curriculum vitae as part of his pro-life "bona fides." Terry has been married twice, having numerous children. With his first wife Cindy, he had a daughter before fostering two additional daughters and a son. He formally adopted the two youngest foster children. He has four sons with his second wife, Andrea.

In the early 1980s, Terry married Cindy Dean, a woman he had met in Bible school. In 1985, he met a woman who had borne her second child in prison and was planning an abortion rather than having a third. Terry persuaded her to continue the pregnancy and a daughter named Tila was born later that year. In 1987, Cindy and Randall Terry had a daughter together whom they named Faith. In March 1988, they took in Tila, then aged three, and her siblings Jamiel, 8, and Ebony, 12, as foster children. All three are biracial; their mother was white. Terry formally adopted the two younger children in 1994 and began describing his family on his résumé as: "Children: One by birth and three black foster children," although Ebony had left home at the age of 16 in 1991. Ebony, who was not adopted by Terry, uses the surname Whetstone, but both Jamiel and Tila took and retained the surname Terry. She converted to Islam, a religion Terry has preached is composed of "murderers" and "terrorists." In 2004, Terry described his relationship with Ebony as "good." However, Terry banned Tila from his home after she became pregnant outside of marriage twice by age 18; her first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. In 1998, when Terry was accused of racism while running for Congress, his son Jamiel stepped forward to defend him. In 2000, Jamiel worked with his father on Steven Forbes' campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. President, and campaigned with his father against gay marriage in Vermont. In 2004, Jamiel publicly announced that he was gay and wrote an article for Out Magazine for which he was paid $2,500. When he learned that the Out article was to be published, Terry pre-empted Jamiel by writing an essay, My Prodigal Son, the Homosexual, in which he writes of pain and disappointment, blames Jamiel's homosexuality and other troubles on his childhood experiences, and contends that much of the Out Magazine article is false and was written by other people. Jamiel's response was, "My father's first and foremost aim is to protect himself. He talks about how I prostitute the family's name, but he's used the fact that he saved my sister from abortion and rescued me from hardship in his speeches and interviews. What's the difference?"

In 2000, Terry divorced his wife of 19 years, Cindy, and married his former church assistant, Andrea Sue Kollmorgen. Kollmorgen, born c. 1976, was approximately 25 at the time of their nuptials; As a consequence of the divorce, the home on 119 acres (0.48 km2) where he had lived with Cindy and their four children was to be sold. His decision to divorce in 2000 to marry Kollmorgen was unfavorably contrasted by some in the press to his own judgment expressed in his 1995 book, The Judgment of God: "Families are destroyed as a father vents his mid-life crisis by abandoning his wife for a 'younger, prettier model.' " His sentiments against divorce had been so strong that when his own parents divorced, "Randall refused to let his children speak with their grandfather for three years," according to interviews with the family done by the Washington Post. As a result of Terry's divorce from Cindy Dean, the pastor of the Landmark Church of Binghamton, New York, "unceremoniously tossed him out" although Terry had been a member there for 15 years. That church had previously censured him for abandoning his wife and the two children still at home in preparation for divorce, and for a "pattern of repeated and sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women." After the censure and expulsion, Terry joined the Charismatic Episcopal Church, a denomination established in 1992. After a period of study commencing in 2005, Terry formally converted to Roman Catholicism in 2006, taking the confirmation name "David Mark." After his conversion, he disavowed the first marriage and divorce, saying, "There were tragic problems that were inherent to the marriage. According to Catholic doctrine as it has been taught to me, those problems made it an invalid sacrament."

In the 2004 essay about Jamiel, three years after divorcing Cindy Dean, Terry described his family as "a great wife, a teenage daughter and two small boys." The teen daughter was Faith Terry, his child by his original wife, born in 1987. In 2004, the Washington Post reported that Terry and Cindy's daughter was in college. Five years into his second marriage, a 2006 article in the National Catholic Register described his current family as "his three, soon to be four, rambunctious young boys." Terry's second wife, Andrea, is also a pro-life activist and was arrested in 2008 for trespass while leafleting a Roman Catholic cathedral parking lot with campaign flyers for a fictitious candidate promoting slavery for African-Americans. Randall Terry stated, "The piece was intended to be incendiary and basically a satire," a protest against vehicles in the church parking lot which, he said, carried bumper stickers supporting pro-choice political candidates, particularly Rudy Giuliani.

Terry's son Jamiel was killed in an automobile accident in November 2011. The two had reportedly reconciled prior to Jamiel's death.

Recently, Terry moved his growing family to Romney, West Virginia to focus on his campaign.