When Sam first spoke to Dane (both pseudonyms) in 2019, he was helping her husband find a job. Dane’s company was hiring, so he reached out to Sam after seeing her post on Whisper about her husband’s need for work. Soon, they started speaking on Snapchat, which escalated to playing truth and dare, and, then, exchanging nudes. Three weeks after meeting online, Dane snuck over to Sam’s house in Pennsylvania while her husband was away. “I had no idea sex could be that good,” Sam says now of their first encounter. “I was literally dizzy with ecstacy.”
Last year, just months after meeting, Sam, 25, and Dane, 42, started documenting their sexual escapades online. “We are both married,” reads their OnlyFans page (which has the handle @married_but_cheating), “but not to each other.” Sam says it was her idea to start making porn. “Dane had to have two back surgeries and would be off work, unpaid, for nearly a year,” she tells me. “We’d been filming and taking pics the whole time, so I figured maybe this would help pay his bills.”
But instead of pretending to be other people in their videos, the pair decided that their story was a sure-fire win — after all, cheater porn is big business, particularly if it’s real. “I think the forbidden fruit and taboo nature of our relationship is exciting,” says Sam. “There’s an element of danger in being caught, and that’s exciting too.”
When it comes to the world of cheater porn, Sam and Dane’s story is pretty unique. While countless porn stars and amateurs make this kind of content, most of them are only pretending to cheat in order to fulfill their viewers’ fantasies. Take, for example, 25-year-old Emma Model, whose “cheating” videos on OnlyFans and Pornhub are actually filmed with her boyfriend. “I get that question a lot,” she says when I ask if she’s actually cheating on anyone. “I don’t mean to ruin anyone’s fantasy.”
Cheating porn is, of course, nothing new. There are currently over 41,000 cheating videos on Pornhub alone, and Google Trends shows that it’s been a consistent search term for the last five years. This makes sense, as cheating is a common occurrence. Though estimates on its prevalence vary wildly depending on who you ask and the definition of “cheating” put forth, recent studies have found that rates hover at around 46 percent for all genders.
Of course, most people look to porn to fulfill a fantasy that they wouldn’t want to act out in real life (see: women watching rape porn or people getting off to “fauxcest”). Still, imagining your partner or yourself cheating can be sexy as hell. But where cheater videos were once presumed to star two actors who had no personal ties, now, more and more creators on subscription sites like OnlyFans are describing themselves as “pro-cheaters” or boasting about being “Britain’s number one cheating wife.” All this begs the question: Is this just a clever way of selling content, or has the democratization of porn encouraged more amateurs to make money off their genuine infidelity?
Pseudonymous Veronica posts cheating content on OnlyFans under the name The Real Hotwife. As she states in her bio, she and her husband are in an open relationship, meaning that, like Emma, her content is filmed with a genuine partner, and the cheating part is a ruse. “Technically nothing we do is ‘cheating,’ but we both find it a turn-on to know that our partner is enjoying sex with someone else, and then we get to ‘reclaim’ them when they get home,” Veronica tells me. Except, when they get home, they often make more “cheating” content with their nanny, who Veronica’s husband has been dating for the last three years.
But while it’s easy for Veronica and Emma — and their co-star partners — to shoot their faux cheating content, it’s harder to find time to film for the few creators who are actually cheating. Currently, Sam is still married to her husband — though she describes him as “controlling, abusive and narcissistic,” and says he’s a serial cheater himself — but Dane is in the process of divorcing his wife as a result of his relationship with Sam. Because of this, their relationship is still hidden, meaning they have to put serious thought into the logistics of their content, including only showing Dane’s face and not Sam’s. “We try to meet at least once a week,” says Sam. “Dane used to come to my house at 5 a.m. after my husband left for work and before my kids got up, but now I usually say I have an appointment or an errand to run.”
But whether the clips are real or not doesn’t seem to matter to most fans. Sam says her subscribers really enjoy her and Dane’s content and their story — but so do Emma and Veronica’s, even though they know it’s all above board. “[The response has been] very positive, to the point where [cheater porn] is my main content,” Emma says. None of the creators I spoke to said they’ve had any controversies surrounding their cheating videos, even when it’s real. Emma says fans even pay her and her boyfriend to act out their own cheating fantasies.
For 29-year-old cheater porn fan Lily (not her real name) from Montana, this involves simply imagining that the man “cheating” in the video is her fiancé. Lily gravitated toward cheater porn after secretly scouring her fiancé’s search history and finding out what porn he watches (she was initially looking for evidence of real-life cheating, but never actually found any). Although his porn history made her feel “shitty,” it also excited her, and she started using his search terms for her own enjoyment. “I was partaking in a sort of layered fantasy [that involved] my boyfriend watching this specific porn and masturbating,” Lily tells me. “Eventually, this fantasy evolved into a different one, wherein my boyfriend was not watching and masturbating, but rather participating in the porn with the women in it. Soon, I was watching cheater porn more specifically.” Now, it’s all she’s watched for the last year.
However, Lily says she also finds her near-obsessive porn fantasy “a little sickening,” and admits it’s driving “a certain level of paranoia” within her about her relationship. Since getting into it, Lily has found herself trying to “catch [her] partner doing something naughty,” which makes her feel simultaneously “gross and turned on.” “I feel very confident that my partner doesn’t cheat on me, so him watching porn and masturbating is the closest I can really get to ‘catching’ him at anything,” she explains. “I know that sucks, which is why I try not to let my fantasy get the best of me, and I usually succeed at tamping down the urge to ‘accidentally’ walk in on him in these moments.”
Lily’s love of cheater porn and urge to catch her boyfriend “betraying” her in some way might, in part, stem from the fact that she was cheated on herself by a boyfriend she had when she was 21. Although she initially denies this — she didn’t start watching cheater porn until seven years later — Lily says she and her ex-boyfriend had the best sex she’d ever had after she found out about his infidelity. “I always placed this in the category of ‘grief sex,’ which in my experience is very intense, sensually and emotionally,” she explains. “I get the same kind of feeling when watching cheater porn, so I suppose there may be a link.”
Nonetheless, this porn habit hasn’t changed her view on monogamy, and neither her nor her fiancé are interested in any sort of poly arrangement.
Still, she can’t pull herself away from this particular niche. What is it about it that she loves so much? “To me, the sexy part is the seducing, so my main requirement is that the woman is sexier than me, and has something I don’t have: big tittes,” she reveals. “Basically, I’m going for a woman who is so sexy that my partner has to cheat on me — he’s been seduced!”
And so, it seems, has she.
Brit Dawson
Brit Dawson is a London-based journalist who mostly writes about sex, women's rights and sex work. She is also the staff writer at Dazed.
