Love Is Blind season 11 star Sarah Williams claims she saw the “sexually explicit” texts her estranged husband, John Shannon, admittedly sent to a stripper who also works as an escort during their marriage.
“When I saw the text messages, which was, as far as I know, it was just this one person in the text that I saw,” Sarah, 34, alleged on the Wednesday, November 11, episode of “The Viall Files” podcast. “She was reminding him that she’s an escort. I later found out that she was the stripper that they met at the strip club. … She was like, ‘I’m an escort. You got to pay me.’”
Sarah and John, 33, were the sole couple to say “I do” in the season 11 finale, though their marriage broke down nearly one year later. John revealed during the Sunday, November 8, reunion that he made a “mistake” that ultimately signified the end of their marriage by exchanging a few racy texts with a stripper — but denied that anything physical happened. (Sarah has stated that she also left their marriage for other reasons, including losing confidence in herself and the problematic way her husband allegedly spoke to her when mad or overwhelmed.)
While detailing the alleged correspondence on the “Viall Files” podcast, Sarah claimed that she found “sexually explicit requests” between John and the unidentified sex worker.
“Then the texts stop, and there’s no evidence of connection or physical cheating,” she said, agreeing with host Nick Viall’s assumption that John was “engaging with [the escort] like a civilian” with the hope of potentially establishing a romantic relationship in the future.
While Sarah acknowledged that John is “his own person,” he admitted his emotional infidelity directly.
“John and I had an open phone policy, but I’ve never been through his phone,” she said. “ I found out because on boy trips, I’m fine with the strip club, like, it’s fine. And we explicitly talked about it. I was like, ‘Yeah, if you go and the guys go, that’s totally OK, just behave [and] don’t be weird about it.’”
Despite Sarah allowing John to go on the trip, she still says he lied about his attendance when further pressed.
“He lied for no reason because we had talked about it and I was like, ‘No, you can go.’ So then that triggered something in my brain,” Sarah added. “I was like, ‘Oh, he lied about the trip. That’s weird.’ And then, it was very laid out for me. It was very easy [to find in his phone].”
In addition to scouring John’s past messages, Sarah also allegedly saw that he had downloaded the dating app Tinder.
“All this is at like 3:00 a.m., mind you, but like I don’t care. I don’t care that, there was intention, and even if you were wasted, you had wasted intention. It’s gross,” Sarah claimed, further alleging that John’s profile had “a match” at the time she discovered his account. “Maybe he’s always had it and it was deactivated or something and he just activated [it]. I don’t know.”
Sarah, who claimed that John even accused her of infidelity months before revealing his texting scandal, subsequently confronted her then-spouse.
“I don’t think he took me seriously at first,” she said on Wednesday’s episode, also claiming that John said he didn’t use the app outside of his boys’ trip where he met the escort. “He says no and nothing physical happened and that, after the texting and stuff, he wanted to come home ‘cause that’s when he realized he liked being married.”
Sarah ultimately filed for divorce in June, citing an irretrievable breakdown of their marriage.
