Bachelor Nation alum Madi Prewett is getting deeply personal about a struggle she’s kept quiet for years — and how faith helped her break free.
On a recent episode of her Stay True podcast, the 29-year-old opened up about battling what she described as “sexual sin,” revealing she developed an addiction to porn and masturbation starting in middle school — and carried shame about it well into adulthood.
“This has been a struggle,” she said on the podcast. “This has been a huge part of my testimony, something I’ve struggled with since middle school. And thankfully, by the grace of God, and by the power of Godly community and people around me, I have been free from porn and masturbation for — I don’t even know — 10 years.”
She continued, “That was something that enslaved me and marked me for so long. That was something I felt like I could not break free from. No matter how much I loved Jesus, I could not shake that sin. I could not break free from porn and masturbation. And I would beat myself up and I would be bound by shame.”
Prewett said her interest in sexuality was sparked by media she consumed as a young teen. “I had already had moments of being curious about things and having certain feelings, or wondering certain things, or fantasizing about certain things [that] I had not told that to anyone,” she shared. “I had not pursued to do anything about that, but I was curious.”
She pinpointed a moment at 13 when a friend introduced her to an “extremely inappropriate” show.
“It was all about sex and sexual relationships and who [the main character] was going to choose based off of who she was attracted to, and it was a whole crazy thing,” Prewett recalled. “But I just remember I had never watched anything like that before, and my body started feeling things that I had never felt before, and I started you know wondering things that I’d never wondered before and then desiring it and then wanting it.”
What started as curiosity soon became a secret routine. Within weeks, Prewett said she was watching porn and masturbating regularly — all while believing she was alone in the struggle.
“This continued for a long time, and then this bled into relationships,” she said. “I was letting the enemy run my life with living in secrecy and living in isolation. This bled into then, when I would start dating someone, I pushed so many boundaries physically.”
Though she grew up in a Christian household, Prewett said she was never given clear guidelines when it came to sexuality. “I didn’t have clarity,” she admitted. “Those were the gray areas of this whole purity thing that I was not clear on, that I was not certain about. And so because of that, I found myself continuing to push boundaries and continuing to go further than I knew deep down in my heart that I wanted to go or that I knew I should go.”
Ultimately, she said her turning point came when she broke the silence and confided in others.
“As soon as I said the thing that I was so scared to say, I immediately felt free,” Prewett shared. “Immediately, something shifted. Something happened when I spoke what was in the dark, and I brought it into the light. Something shifted, something happened. Obviously that doesn’t mean I went from that moment and never struggled again — absolutely not. I continued to struggle. But as I brought it into the light and I brought other people into it, I then created an atmosphere where my sin was brought into the light, people were aware of it, and they then could hold me accountable.”
