Jehovah’s Witness swapped Bible for bondage — & roped in hubby

This churchgoer found her holy grail — in sadomasochistic sex work.

After stripping herself of the religious binds that once restricted her sexual self-expression, former Jehovah’s Witness Ariel Anderssen strapped on sexy ropes, handcuffs and mouth gags to become a full-time bondage model. 

“My job is a strange kind of niche, but I always knew it fascinated me,” Anderssen, 45, from Welshpool, Wales, told Kennedy News. “Even in the Bible when someone got tied up or captured I’d always think it was an interesting bit.”

She and her husband Hywel Phillips — a once “respectable” nuclear physics lecturer who now works as his wife’s bondage fetish photographer — earn $4,700 a month by taking risqué snapshots with subtle sacrilegious undertones. 

“Ariel’s [religious] background runs through our work as a subtext, but it’s not something we’ve done anything with overtly,” explained Phillips, 54, who previously served as an instructor at nuclear research center CERN.

“Her being her best self is a rebellion against her upbringing,” he added of his bawdy bride, who, as a demonstration of “revenge” against the faith, even models under the name of an ex-Jehovah’s Witness president.

Anderssen was born into the religion, and her parents staunchly enforced modesty, daily Bible study and incessant evangelizing.

The church, according to the BDSM bombshell, strictly forbade sex before marriage, masturbation and even barred certain sex acts between two married people.   

“They had rules about what it was OK to do in bed — even if you were married and heterosexual,” Anderssen explained. “We were told oral sex was wrong.”

“We were basically told anything you’d want to do in bed was shameful. It was shameful and wrong, and God wouldn’t like it — and he’d know,” she further lamented. “I don’t think we had any sense of sex being a positive thing at all. Looking back, it was really horrible.”

At age 13, much to her delight, Anderssen’s parents left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. But it wasn’t until she turned 16 that the would-be model discovered her passion for kinky sex play. 

“I grew up without any knowledge that BDSM was a thing,” the sex-positive model bemoaned. “I had no idea that this was something we could do until I was 16, when [a political figure] killed himself by mistake doing some kind of autoerotic asphyxiation. I read it in the paper and suddenly saw the expression ‘sadomasochist.’ “

Still, Anderssen says she “suppressed” her desires to explore bondage and other bedroom kinks until she started modeling in her mid-20s and found herself with a photographer at a BDSM exhibition.

“I realized I was surrounded by the sort of work that had been in my head my whole life,” the daring model recalled. “If I was surrounded by artwork that represented my sexuality, probably the people in this gallery were kinky. And they were!”

Anderssen subsequently started starring in bondage photo shoots and plunged head first into the world of fetish culture.

“I started being offered spanking and bondage work, and so I started appearing in spanking films as well. Everything I tried, I loved,” she enthused. “I built my professional network, and soon I started being invited abroad. I worked in the States and Australia — I was just being tied up all over the world. It was amazing.”

Through BDSM modeling, Anderssen met her husband, Hywel Phillips, who was juggling his duties as a physics professor with his saucy side hustle as a fetish photographer.

“I’d always had an interest in bondage since I was young,” the ex-academic explained. “I started out trying to draw it, then started doing photography as a bit of a hobby when I could afford it, when I was a lecturer in my early 30s.”

“When we tell people what we do, they’re generally very positive,” the snapper stated. “Our friends and family know what we do, which is very fortunate, and I’ve never really had a particularly bad reaction from anyone in our personal lives.”

Now, no longer worshipping God, the only man in Anderssen’s life is her shutterbug spouse. The model cooed over her husband, telling Kennedy News that his transition from physics professor to a full-time photographer is nothing short of divine.

“He was so respectable and now what he does is so out there. He’s been very successful at both,” she fawned. “It’s just not quite the career progression people would expect from an academic.”