YouTube stars reveal they’re nonetheless married after Ashley Madison leak

Controversial YouTube couple Sam and Nia Rader have revealed they are still together, eight years after the Ashley Madison ‘cheaters leak’ almost destroyed their marriage.

The devout Christians, who went viral courtesy of Sam, 38, filming him test Nia’s urine in secret before revealing to his shocked wife she was pregnant, saw the pair’s clean-cut reputations crushed when the builder was outed as a member of the dating website, which encourages married couples to cheat on their partners.

They have documented how the 2015 leak affected their lives on hit Netflix series Ashley Madison, currently the No2 watched show on the platform. 

And speaking to MailOnline in their only UK interview, the vloggers, who share four children, have revealed they are still together and blame God, not the hackers, for exposing Sam’s infidelities and claim his father’s own cheating sparked him to follow in his footsteps.

The couple also refute speculation their ‘pregnancy reveal video’ was ‘fake’ or ‘staged’, with Nia, 35, insisting, ‘It was real, it was the biggest shock of my life.’ 

Sam said: ‘Nia and I have so much history and that’s what made our marriage all the more difficult to give up on. Nia knew what we had deep down was true and real despite my stupid string.

‘I don’t regret getting married young, we had only been with each other sexually until I did some sexual things with somebody else… I wish what was different is we had mentors in our life early on, an active father and mother, so you can see how important that role is early on in marriage, and we were both lacking that.

‘I didn’t have my dad to lean on or to speak truths into me and say, “you’re going to want to do this in your marriage, you’re going to struggle with this, but you can’t go down that route.”

‘My dad committed adultery, it was actually traumatic, he took me to this woman’s house where he was cheating on my mum and when we got home, I exposed him to my mum and he walked out of the house and blamed me and my brother and left my mum with five children to raise on her own.’

Sam and Nia, who married in their early 20s, describe their romance as a ‘fairytale’ and say they both saved each other from troubled upbringings.

At the age of three, Nia tragically lost her mother and while her father wasn’t present, she was raised by her grandparents, who eventually also split due to infidelity in their marriage.

They became successful YouTubers, with over 2.52million subscribers, after a video of them lip-syncing to Frozen song Love Is an Open Door went viral and fans fell in love with their happy family life.

After struggling for over a year to conceive their second baby and Nia suspected she could be pregnant, Sam tested his wife’s urine and revealed to her that she was expecting, shot for another one of the couple’s videos.

But after the clip aired on Netflix’s Ashley Madison, some viewers doubted the sincerity of the emotional moment, claiming it was ‘setup’ for hits.

Nia said: ‘There are a lot of sceptics, but it was real, it was the shock of my life. We had been trying for a year and a half to get pregnant, we had so many times it was a no, to get the yes was the best thing ever.’ 

Dating website Ashley Madison launched in 2001 with the tagline, ‘Life is short, have an affair’ and targeted married individuals to sign up with their personal information, guaranteeing complete confidentiality.

But in 2015, the website was hacked by an unknown group who exposed the identities of all subscribers including celebrities, as well as their hidden sexual desires.

Not only had Sam signed up to the website with the username dirty_little_secret_man, but he also had explicit affairs and even attempted to have a romance with one of Nia’s friends, who rejected his advances.

However, Sam doesn’t blame the hackers for exposing his secrets, saying his beliefs as a Christian meant it was only a matter of time until he needed to confess his sins.

He said: ‘God has been preparing me for this moment. I have been surrounded by brothers and Christ to open up about these things and I owe it to them to strengthen me and be open about my betrayals.

‘I see time and time again so many men in the same place I was and if I can help other marriages, I will do whatever it takes.

‘Failing in a marriage doesn’t just impact your spouse, it impacts your children, and as I have seen in my past, it echos in generations to come. It is so important that we stop and make good decisions. God has called me to be open about this on Netflix.

‘I never thought ‘oh no, my private information has been leaked’, I wasn’t mad at them. 

‘The bible is clear, God won’t be mocked, and I was out as a professing Christian and living with all these secrets and Nia, who is this strong woman, he was protecting her, and he exposed me for what I was, and I give him the credit for it and not the hackers. I know it impacted other people differently.’ 

The couple admit building back the foundations of their marriage has taken years of counselling and when Nia first learned of the betrayals, Sam moved out of the family home.

And their commitment to each other is being further tested as online trolls react to the Netflix three-parter with some claiming Sam ‘doesn’t deserve’ Nia, who says at her lowest she was forced to overcome ‘abandonment’ and ‘rejection’ as a result of her husband’s actions.

After having two more children since the Ashley Madison scandal, Sam proposed to Nia for a second time and the couple renewed their vows, marking a fresh start in their marriage.

Nia said: ‘A huge part of our healing journey was counselling, both professionally and pastoral counselling. We really dug our heels into that, we did hours and hours and hours a week of counselling and it was intense and hard work, but it needed to be done.

‘He didn’t take away my partner in life, he was so present, taking the kids to school, putting them to bed, cooking, doing laundry but he would leave. 

‘He wasn’t staying at the house at that time, and I probably would never admit this in the moment, but I needed that… I was very, very hard on him. I made him feel very unwelcome. But he never backed down and that was a key thing that helped us take a step forward for me to even consider him.’

Sam added: ‘We haven’t had a lot of kind people. Some people think I don’t deserve Nia and she should not be with me right now.

‘But we have a happy marriage, full of true, deep intimacy, which was absent early on. We know each other down to the core and when that’s there, the intimacy is unmatched.’

Sam and Nia have told their story in new book Live in Truth: Public Scandal | Secret Vows | Restored Hearts, which is available to buy now from Amazon. 

The couple hope their experiences, from fairytale to scandal and redemption, can help prevent other marriages suffering with the same issues from breaking apart. 

Sam added: ‘We alternate writing chapters. It’s about how our relationship was pulled out of a movie, it was so romantic, and we filled roles in each other’s lives that have been missing.

‘We became each other’s dad, which was strange, we helped raise each other but we were deeply in love too.’