He ran a popular Manchester bar. Three women say he assaulted them

In late April, one of Manchester’s most popular bars suddenly closed its doors. Sammy’s Bar, in the Northern Quarter, shut down because of a slew of online claims about predatory behaviour being made against its ever-present founder Sammy Shonn. 

Shonn, 42, has dismissed the stories about him as a smear campaign. But The Mill has now spoken to three separate women who say that Shonn sexually assaulted them, as well as one former staff member at the bar who says he groped her. Their accounts are supported by WhatsApp messages that they sent to Shonn and friends after the incidents in question and by the recollection of friends who they spoke to at the time. 

A lawyer representing Shonn says that he “categorically denies that he has acted in any way that is unlawful, inappropriate or aggressive”. The lawyer told The Mill that running the bar “became unsustainable for Mr Shonn” because of “the nature of the allegations being levied against him on social media.” That seems to be a reference to a viral thread on Reddit — entitled DO NOT GO TO SAMMY’S BAR — which was posted on Monday 28 April and attracted more than 100 comments. 

Greater Manchester Police says it is in the early stages of an investigation into allegations of stalking and harassment against Shonn, which come from a separate woman who The Mill has not spoken to. Shonn’s lawyer says he has “never been contacted or arrested by Greater Manchester Police in regards to any of these allegations and he has not had his electronic devices seized.”

In relation to today’s story, a police spokesperson told us: “We’re aware of the serious allegations published in The Mill and we encourage anyone affected or with information to contact us in confidence online, via 101 or anonymously through Crimestoppers.” 

Two of the women we’ve spoken to were customers at the bar, one was a DJ who played there and one is a former member of staff. One of the women says Shonn had sex with her in the bar without her consent in late 2020. “I would say I said no four or five times,” she told The Mill. A friend of hers remembers her telling her the story months later. Another woman recalls Shonn aggressively trying to kiss her and touch her one night in December 2020 in Sammy’s Bar. In the morning, she wrote to him on WhatsApp: “You weren’t really respecting me when I said no.”

“I did tell Sammy no sex,” a third woman texted a friend after one of the incidents in August 2023. “And he did just ignore me”. The woman says she realised there was a clear pattern of behaviour when she saw the Reddit thread, which has prompted a wave of public concern among young women in Manchester. 

“The thing that freaked me out when I realised what had happened is the theme is he takes advantage of vulnerable women,” she told us. “And he takes advantage of them by getting them drunk and giving them shots.” 

Last week, we reported that Shonn kept a recording of himself having sex with a customer in the bar that was captured via the venue’s CCTV camera, and later shared six screenshots of the encounter with the woman. Via a lawyer, Shonn asked for that story to be taken down, saying it was inaccurate. 

His lawyer continues to deny that Shonn ever downloaded the footage onto his phone, and says that the woman must have obtained the images from the video by other means. The Mill has seen screenshots of a WhatsApp exchange in which Shonn appears to share the images from the video with the woman. 

‘I said no four or five times’

Sammy’s Bar opened in 2019 and received glowing reviews. The website Manchester Finest described the “powerful welcoming feeling” you get when you enter and called the business “something special”. It had garish yellow 70s-styled interiors, vintage sofas and only stocked tinnies, gin, rum and vodka. 

“It was kind of the cool place to go,” says Molly Clare, editor of the culture magazine Dance Policy, who remembers meeting Shonn in the bar. “When you first go in there, he’s very outgoing. He was always flirtatious.”

One woman in her mid twenties who regularly visited Sammy’s Bar with her friends in late 2022 and early 2023 says she got to know Shonn and began to consider him “a close friend”. She struggled with bipolar disorder, and during a difficult period, she visited the bar in August 2023 as she saw it as a place where she could be safe. It was after hours, and she says Shonn gave her “shot after shot after shot. I must have had eight in an hour”. 

When it was clear the night was coming to an end, she asked to sleep on his sofa but told him “just so we’re absolutely clear on this, we’re absolutely not having sex” (she says the pair’s relationship had previously been entirely platonic). She says she didn’t want to return to her apartment, where she lived on her own, because she was feeling depressed: “I just didn’t want to be alone when I was feeling this low.” He agreed, and after they left the bar, they stopped at her apartment so she could pick up some things before going back to Shonn’s. 

“I remember picking stuff off the floor and turning around and he was kissing me,” she says. “And then I basically just remember him pushing me on the bed and having sex with me.” She says she was in a state of shock and didn’t resist. “I just went into freeze mode.” She says she woke up the next day on the sofa at his apartment, unaware of how she got there.

“I did tell Sammy no sex,” she told a friend via WhatsApp message the next day. “And he did just ignore me.”

The woman says the experience had a lasting impact on her mental health. “My whole body was cold. And it was that thing where any kind of touch was triggering me and I would start crying, I would randomly cry every few hours if I thought about it,” she says, recalling the weeks after the incident, which she describes as a sexual assault. “I trusted him enough to be vulnerable with him and he completely took advantage of me and emotionally scarred me.” 

Shonn’s lawyer did not address this incident specifically in their letters to The Mill, but reiterated that he has never sexually assaulted anyone or taken advantage of his customers. 

Another regular customer in her mid twenties can recall a night in October 2020 that left her feeling “violated” by Shonn. As her friends started to leave the bar, they asked if she was okay being left alone with Shonn and she reassured them she was. “I'd been there so many times I had no issue being alone with him,” she says. “He gives off quite camp gay energy so I felt quite safe.”

He offered her lines of coke and made her cocktails, and she says she was enjoying his company. “I was like, yeah brill, free drugs,” she says. “And then he started to push himself on me a bit.” 

The woman says she was clear with Shonn that she didn't want to have sex. “I would say I said no four or five times,” she told The Mill. “We were literally in the bar and he had a sofa there, like a plank, it’s not very comfortable. And I ended up laying on that in the end, and I just thought let’s just allow it, let’s just leave it.”

“I do feel violated by him, 100%,” the woman told The Mill. “There was like, almost a betrayal of trust and he took advantage of my niceness, I think.” 

A friend says that she realised something had happened when a member of their friendship group suggested they go to Sammy’s Bar on a night out, and the woman suddenly seemed uncomfortable. “She just seemed really apprehensive about going there and that’s when I knew something was off,” her friend says. “And that’s when she told me that she felt really pressured to stay and do stuff with him, I guess. She was obviously upset.” 

Via his lawyer, Shonn vehemently denies ever taking advantage of customers or doing anything illegal, but he did not address this incident specifically. 

‘I feel really uncomfortable about last night’

Rumours swirled about Sammy’s Bar from its inception, according to more than a dozen regular customers and staff who we have spoken to in recent weeks. But despite this, the bar exploded in popularity. “I think people turn a blind eye because they know it’s a place where they can be feral, do coke with the blinds down and just get loose,” a former customer told The Mill.

Particularly popular were the nights where local DJs performed. A 20-year-old woman who was one of those DJs became close to Shonn and slept with him twice, which she describes as fully consensual encounters. 

But on a later occasion, in December 2020, she felt she was being taken advantage of by Shonn. She says it was the end of the night and everyone else had left the bar. She had taken ketamine and cocaine — she says she was addicted to ketamine and describes herself as “a very vulnerable person at the time”.

“I was so drunk, I was off my face,” she says. Shonn “pinned me up against the wall” and started to kiss her and feel her up. “And I said I’m really drunk, I’m fucked, I just want to go home. I felt dizzy. I kept saying I wanna go home, I wanna stop. And he kept doing it.” It didn’t go further — after an hour of him persisting, she left the bar and went home.

The next day, she sent him a WhatsApp message. 

“I feel really uncomfortable about last night,” she wrote. “You were kind of inappropriate.”

Shonn asked what she meant. She replied: “You weren’t really respecting me when I said no.”

“I’ve never been inappropriate in my life,” he wrote back. “I think we should stop seeing each other. This is an accusation that’s making me uncomfortable. I don’t think we should contact or speak to each other.”

“How dare you actually deny,” she wrote back, saying she felt “uncomfortable at how much I had to say no last night”. He said he felt “sick” and requested that she never contact him again.

A friend of hers, who also used to DJ at Sammy’s Barr, says that the woman confided in him in the weeks after the incident. “She didn’t go into the specifics of the assault. She didn’t seem comfortable enough to do so at the time,” the friend told The Mill. “At the time she was in a really vulnerable state. She wasn’t all there. She was really struggling with her mental health and she was really struggling with addiction and substance abuse and stuff like that and I think he took advantage of that. It was horrible to see one of your friends go through that.”

According to former staff, Shonn would talk about how he wanted his bar to be an “inclusive, queer safe space” and promised to kick out straight men who were lecherous towards women. When he was faced with accusations of being aggressive or predatory towards women, he would point to this fact in his defence. “He told me, oh, you know, straight men don't get let in, and then they go home and write reviews while angry,” a former staff member told me, remembering him saying that he had “been surrounded by strong women all his life” and that he wanted to make his bar “a safe space for them”.

But another former staff member in her early twenties, who worked at the bar during the summer of 2021, says she quickly began to feel uncomfortable around Shonn. “I kept him at arms length, I thought he was creepy,” she explains. One night, when she was working in Sammy’s Bar with Shonn and no one else, she says she texted a friend who worked at a pub opposite to come over the road while she and Shonn closed the bar, because “I felt uncomfortable around him”.

After they finished closing the bar, Shonn asked her and her friend to join him on the sofas for what he called “family time”. Multiple sources describe “family time” as an period at the end of the night where Shonn would ask a select group of friends and staff members to join him to hang out and debrief on the night. (Despite what several former staff members remember, Shonn’s lawyer says these sessions never involved drugs).

It was around 3am, and the woman remembers feeling tired. “And he put his hand in between my legs in front of my friend and I said to my friend let’s leave now,” she says. “I thought, if this guy can do this in front of my friend, he’ll do whatever he wants.”

Her friend can remember witnessing the incident first-hand. “He just scooched up right next to her and put his hand in between her legs and touched her legs. I could just see it on her face. She froze,” she says. “And luckily she’s quite bolshy and she stood up and she was like, come on, I’m going, I’m going.” 

Shonn did not address this incident specifically, but denies any suggestion of wrongdoing. 

Closing the bar 

Until recently, the disquiet about Sammy’s Bar has mostly consisted of whispers shared between young people in Manchester rather than clear allegations of misconduct. The Mill was first contacted about the bar in 2023, when a reader emailed us to say that something didn’t seem right about the business. “I’ve been a few times recently and am feeling slightly odd about it,” the reader told us, saying that the bar’s owner guarded the entrance carefully and seemed to only let in young women. 

We published our first piece about the bar in December last year, but the claims from customers that we were reporting — including Shonn being aggressive with customers and “bizarrely” curating a crowd of young women — didn’t convince some readers. One described the piece as “vindictive” and another acknowledged that Shonn is “certainly a little intense” but that his behaviour was fairly commonplace in the hospitality industry. 

But the piece received a new audience in April, when the viral Reddit thread linked back to it, and the thread emboldened some of the women we’ve spoken to for this article to agree to speak to a journalist. (To be clear, The Mill has not corroborated the stories posted on Reddit). 

The local copywriter Molly Clare posted “This has been a long time coming,” on her Instagram story alongside screenshots of key allegations in the Reddit thread. She later posted a yellow poster on her Instagram story, designed to mimic the yellow interiors of the bar, titled BOYCOTT SAMMY’S BAR, and has raised nearly £700 for stickers inscribed with that logo that she plans to put around town. 

The woman who says she was assaulted by Shonn after she had asked to sleep on his sofa, says she spotted a pattern in the stories that were being told online. “The thing that freaked me out when I realised what had happened is the theme is he takes advantage of vulnerable women,” she told us. “And he takes advantage of them by getting them drunk and giving them cocaine and shots. And I think that’s the whole point really.”

She says that talking about her experience has been traumatising, but it has also felt good to see women turning the tables on Shonn. “I feel like there’s been so much weight in favour of him for so long. To have something in resistance, I just wanna support that basically.”

On Wednesday 30 April, two days after the Reddit thread was published, Shonn wrote a message to staff, describing “a hurtful smear campaign against my name” and saying that “whilst my instinct would ordinarily be to stand up against the lies, it has admittedly knocked me for six”. He told them they wouldn’t have any work that week, as he had decided that “for my own mental welfare I have decided it will be best to shut the bar this weekend”. 

Five days later, he wrote another message. “I want to say I love you all,” he said, saying the past weeks had not been easy on him but that he was “finding strength to deal with this”. He also offered some clarity: the bar would reopen in the coming weeks “with some changes” but Shonn would no longer be involved. “I’ve come to the decision that I’m going to step back and not be involved in the bar,” he said.

Staff then received an ultimatum. “If you would like to continue being part of it, please message me privately,” he said, promising “I won’t take it personally if you decide not to”. They had just two days to make up their mind: “You can let me know by Wednesday afternoon”. Six staff members left that week, and one worker is said to have indicated that they wanted to stay on. 

One staff member who says she had previously believed Shonn when he said the rumours swirling about him were the result of malicious straight men who were angry they hadn’t been let into the bar, says the Reddit thread changed her mind. She said she recognised him in some of the quotes that were being attributed to him. She sent Shonn a WhatsApp message apologising and saying “after everything, I don’t feel like I can work for you again”.

If you know more about this story, please contact Mollie directly.