"Evil Influencer" and the Dark Side of Sex Addiction

Source: Alina Rosanova / iStock

The Netflix documentary Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story (2025) exposes the unethical and criminal activities of therapist and life coach Jodi Hildebrandt. She was arrested for serious child abuse and jailed in Utah in 2023.

Some of the services she offered were helping couples with marital and sexual difficulties, and specifically treating “sex/porn addiction,” diagnosing most men with the pseudo-disorder. Jodi Hildebrandt, like many people in Utah, was highly religious, and she told men that they were abusers because they watched pornography. The documentary revealed that her psychology licence was suspended because she broke confidentiality by reporting a male client as a sexual offender only because he watched pornography, with no evidence of offending behaviours otherwise.

Despite her license being suspended, she continued to practice as a life coach, and she was a skilled businesswoman, using social media to promote her message of recovery, using a language borrowed from psychology and making the narrative fit with Mormon beliefs and culture. Jodi also partnered with a Mormon influencer family who was very popular online. She spoke with great conviction about her methods, and people believed her.

However, behind closed doors, she caused chaos in numerous people’s lives—including people in her own family—with dangerous practices of psychological manipulation and imposing her own religious ideas onto others. She broke up marriages and left long-lasting scars on her clients. She also went as far as seriously abusing children whom she believed were in evil’s grasp.

Although this is an extreme case of religious-based abuse and malpractice to the level of serious criminal offence, and within the specific context of Utah’s Mormon population and culture, it reveals a dark side to popular “sex/porn addiction” narratives.

Indeed, outside of Utah, the “sex/porn addiction” narratives that we see on a regular basis on social media and in clickbait headlines position certain sexual behaviours and particularly pornography viewing as problematic and disordered behaviours, making it sound like a legitimate disorder when scientific words like “dopamine” are borrowed (and misused), and with fear-mongering stories about the consequences of watching pornography: “the great rise of porn addiction,” “porn addiction ruins families,” “porn addiction is an epidemic,” “porn causes erectile dysfunction,” etc. These narratives are inaccurate and not supported by scientific data, but they create a “porn panic,” making the public afraid of sexually explicit adult media, shaming people who enjoy watching pornography, and even contributing to relationship breakdowns because of so much misinformation on this topic.

Because of poor sex education and poor pornography literacy, it is difficult for the public to discern what is real and what isn’t, so, naturally, they will believe the sources that seem trustworthy, like, for example, a clinician positioning themselves as “expert” and promoting all the dangers of “porn addiction.” Why wouldn’t the public believe such professionals?

What is often hidden in those narratives is that a majority of professionals who support the concepts of “sex/porn addiction” and call themselves “experts” make significant financial profits from such claims. Indeed, it is lucrative to make people afraid of sex and porn—because it fits with the current societal sex-negativity due to poor sex education—and they can sell methods claiming to treat the “addiction.”

Another common motivation of such professionals is that they either have religious views, and/or operate with a heteronormative and mononormative lens; they may intentionally or unintentionally impose their personal distaste of porn onto the public under the guise of a clinical disorder. By doing so, a significant ethical problem arises: how can someone make an informed choice to access a professional’s services when they are not clear if they will receive evidence-based psychotherapy or religious guidance? Indeed, a professional who imposes their personal and/or religious views onto their client is an ethical breach. Moreover, heteronormative and mononormative therapies with hidden religiosity related to sexual behaviours can be harmful to queer populations.

The reality is that the concept of “sex/porn addiction” is not supported by science, and it is not endorsed as a mental health disorder. The closest diagnosis that is endorsed by the World Health Organization is compulsive sexual behaviour disorder, which is not categorised as addiction. So, clinicians who use the terms “sex/porn addiction” with conviction and with a clinical language are actually promoting their personal views about certain sexual behaviours.

The concept of “sex/porn addiction” has always been embedded in religiosity (Christianity mainly), which remains today. In its very inception, it was also associated with homophobia, as homosexuality was considered a “sexual addiction.” Today, in most liberal regions, the “sex/porn addiction” narrative is much less overtly homophobic, but Netflix’s documentary reminds us that this homophobic notion is still very much alive in some religious groups, as mentioned in the documentary, encouraging conversion practices, despite the Mormon Mental Health Association’s statement against conversion practices in 2015.

Pornography Essential Reads

What Women Hate About Porn

Is Watching Porn Alone a Betrayal?

In more liberal regions, the dark side “sex/porn addiction” remains in popular discourse with its priority on abstinence, heteronormativity, mononormativity, and religiosity, and therefore a high likelihood of pathologising non-problematic behaviours such as kink, fetish, polyamory, etc.

While the story of Jodi Hildebrandt is extreme, the wider “sex/porn addiction” narratives that the public believes to be true are pseudoscience profiting some clinics with misplaced religiosity hidden under the guise of therapy.