Exclusive: Sammy’s Bar owner used CCTV to secretly film himself having sex with a customer

The Mill has seen evidence that the owner of a popular bar in the Northern Quarter secretly filmed himself having sex with a female customer via the bar’s CCTV system. The woman says the video was taken without her consent, which could constitute a criminal offence. 

Sammy Shonn, the 42-year-old owner of Sammy’s Bar, later showed the video to the woman he had sex with, and sent her screenshots of the encounter, which she shared with us. With her permission, we are publishing a blurred-out version of two of those screenshots. 

The woman told The Mill that she feels “sick and exposed”. We’ve seen messages she sent to Shonn on Instagram in which she wrote to him: “I feel like I’ve been violated”. Shonn has not responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Sammy’s – a popular bar on Swan Street – seems to have been closed for the past month. A month ago, a popular Reddit thread titled “DO NOT GO TO SAMMYS BAR” alleged various types of predatory behaviour by Shonn (we have not verified these claims) and linked to an article we published late last year which raised questions about his treatment of customers. 

It is a crime to record someone having sex without their knowledge or consent, particularly if the recording is used for sexual gratification. Doing so is classed as voyeurism under Section 67 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and comes with a maximum sentence of two years in prison. 

The woman says she later heard that Shonn was sharing videos of himself having sex with women in his bar. The non-consensual sharing of intimate images or videos, often referred to as "revenge porn", is also a crime.

In an Instagram message exchange with the woman, he said he would “never, ever” share such videos. The woman who was filmed having sex with him says she has been encouraged by other women who say they have had negative experiences at Sammy’s Bar to go to the police. She says she is considering doing so. 

‘Drowning me in free drinks’

The woman – who was 23 at the time of the incident, and who we are going to refer to by the pseudonym Sophie in order to protect her identity – says she was on a night out with four friends when she met Shonn in his bar in January 2020. She felt that he was interested in her “instantaneously” after her friends entered Sammy’s Bar. “As soon as I walked into the bar, he was all over me. He was like, oh, you're so pretty, you're so beautiful.”

Sophie says that Shonn spent the night “drowning me in free drinks”, and she remembers thinking “oh God, this guy’s so nice. Why is he being so nice to me?”. Later, he invited her into the basement — a concrete room underneath the bar with a table and a few chairs where Shonn occasionally hosts private parties — to join his friends. She says they drank beer, snorted lines of cocaine and chatted about her work.

The crowd thinned and by 4am, all of Sophie’s friends had left. She and Shonn were back in the upstairs bar at this point, where they had sex. 

Sophie says she left with the impression that the night was nothing more than “a bit of fun”. But in the following weeks, Shonn was persistent. He sent her graphic screenshots of BDSM pornography, describing what he wanted to do to her, and selfies of his bare torso. “He got a bit obsessed with me, messaging me all the time, insisting he see me again,” she recalls. “It just got to a point where he wanted me all time, he wanted to have sex with me all the time, he wanted to sniff coke all the time.”

Sophie found out about the videos when she was walking past Sammy’s Bar a few weeks later. Shonn stopped her to say hi and said he’d been “reminiscing about our night together”, and showed her a video on his phone of the two of them having sex, footage that he had apparently downloaded from the bar’s CCTV cameras. “I was like, I didn’t even know that would be filmed,” she recalls telling him. She says Shonn explained it by saying he needed CCTV cameras in the bar “in case anything happens”. 

“I bet you’ve got a collection of those,” she remembers saying to him, to which he responded: “No, no, no, not at all.” 

Later that evening, he sent her screenshots of what he called “our sex tape”. She says she didn’t initially realise the gravity of what he had done. “I think I just laughed it off because I thought it was so weird that I didn't really question it,” she told The Mill. “And then as time elapsed, I realised how creepy he actually was”. 

Sophie remembers talking to a friend of hers about how persistent his messages were and about the age gap between them. “I was 23 when I met him. I think he was 37 at the time,” she says. “I was speaking to my friend about it and I was like: This is really fucking weird, he’s got this footage of me now, it’s on his phone, what’s he going to do with that?”

‘I feel like I’ve been violated’

In the summer of 2021, Sophie says she heard from her then-boyfriend that Shonn had been “filming himself having sex with people in the bar.” The information came from a friend of his, who we have also spoken to, and the friend says he passed it onto Sophie “out of sheer horror”.

As Sophie remembers it, she was told that he could be using the CCTV to stream to his phone and then sharing it on to other people. Shonn strongly denies sharing the footage, but this denial does not explain the need to retain copies of the footage on his phone.

In a series of private messages to the Sammy’s Bar Instagram account, she confronted Shonn about what she had heard. “What’s this about you showing people your cctv of you shagging girls in the bar,” she wrote in messages that she has shown to The Mill. “I feel so sick if you’ve done that to me,” she went on, adding: “Sammy u know that’s fucking illegal”.

The bar’s Instagram account — presumably operated by Shonn — denied sharing the videos, saying he was “shaking” with anxiety and that he was “distraught and upset” (The Mill has no direct evidence that he shared the videos with others). But his messages also seemed to suggest he had filmed similar videos with other women: “I’m sorry you feel this why (sic) but I haven’t done anything,” he wrote. “Never once shown anyone anything not even just you but any girl.”

Sophie’s boyfriend at the time, who is now a friend of hers, remembers the events clearly. “She was so upset,” he told The Mill. “From her perspective, she’d just slept with someone in a bar. To find out it had been filmed and shared, a year later, that’s horrible. I felt bad for the person I cared about.”

“I felt sick and exposed,” Sophie says. “Manchester is a really small place and I know he probably would have shown people I know.”

A woman who was dating Shonn at the time remembers him being anxious “about how someone was saying he had filmed someone on CCTV while he had sex with them and showed people.”

In the past month, Sammy’s Bar has been the source of growing conversation in Manchester after a viral Reddit thread accused Shonn of predatory behaviour and throwing customers out in violent, coke-fuelled rages. Molly Clare, editor of the culture magazine Dance Policy, has raised nearly £600 via a GoFundMe page to pay for stickers with the slogan BOYCOTT SAMMY’S BAR, with a QR code attached that takes you to the Reddit thread. 

The Reddit thread also prompted Sophie to speak out about what happened to her. “At the time, I was so exhausted from it I thought, I just want to forget about it,” she told The Mill. But after seeing the Reddit thread, she had a change of heart. “Now, I think this needs to stop.”

A note from Mollie, who wrote this story: Today’s article is free to read and share. On Saturday morning, we are publishing a more in-depth story about Sammy’s Bar, based on conversations I’ve had with 12 people over the past month, including former staff and customers. Like much of our journalism, that story will just be for Mill members, because it’s only by having thousands of paying members that we can do this kind of investigative reporting about Greater Manchester.