TESTIMONY
Jeff Myers: A Pornographer's Redemption
By Robert Hull
The 700 Club
CBN.com
– "I was one of the largest producers of online pornography in the country. I had 1.3 million registered images a staggering number, and we had thousands and thousands of hours of video."
Jeff Myers never set out to become a pornographer, but by his late 30s, he was king of an online pornography empire.
"My soul was sterile; it was dead. I really had no conscience whatsoever," Jeff tells The 700 Club. "It was all about me. It was about making as much money as I could possibly make."
Jeff was driven by deep insecurities that began in his childhood. "I never really measured up, and I was always trying to obtain something that I could never get to. It kind of centered around money; the more money I could get, the more successful I felt or I could make myself look to others."
He married in his early 30s, but after five years, they divorced as he began spending much of his time and money in strip clubs.
"It really became my second lifestyle. I was spending thousands of dollars a week at these clubs, vying for this fake attention from these young ladies. Within a short period of time, that lifestyle little by little became real to me. I had to have this attention. It made me feel important. For the first time in my life, even though it was fake, it didn’t matter. I felt like I was important to somebody."
One night a dancer told him she wanted help starting her own pornographic web site.
"I’m thinking in the back of my head, 'Well, I could do that,' and so I did. The first week we did $6,000 in sales, and I was instantly hooked. Within a year I had 19 web sites. We were doing sales of $30,000 to $40,000 a month for our sites. In two years I sold my whole program for 2.5 million."
For three more years, Jeff produced pornographic material. He began taking the drug ecstasy to get him through the days and nights.
"It was about a 150 hours a week of drug-induced fake happiness that is as far from real as you can get. I knew I was destroying lives at this point. It caught up to me mentally that what I was doing was just disastrous, not only just for the models that worked for me, but for people in general. I knew something was going to have to give, but I stuck to it, and this drug kept me happy. As much as I had people around me, I was so completely alone. I had many nights just by myself just alone."
One of his models asked Jeff to remove her photos from the Internet, but he had already sold them. She also asked for ecstasy for some friends and herself. Finally Jeff said yes.
"I grabbed three pills, one for each of her friends, not knowing that she had had about a month-long conversation with the local police department about me and about getting her pictures off the Internet."
Within a few hours, several drug enforcement officers raided his home and arrested Jeff.
"Charged me with manufacturing and distributing methamphetamine ecstasy and took everything I owned. It cleared me out, and it left me sitting in this big house looking around wondering what just happened to me.
I was severely depressed. Everyone had abandoned me. I went upstairs, grabbed a bottle of vodka and Vicodin. I took all of them, drank the fifth of vodka and I should have died. For whatever miraculous reason, I woke up the next morning when I shouldn’t have. I think at that point I realized I need help and I can’t do this on my own.
I just so desperately wanted someone to reach out to me, and I was alone."
He drove to a Christian camp he attended as a young man. That night at camp they gave an altar call. Jeff was one of the first to come. He prayed and asked God to forgive his sins and give him a new start.
"I don’t know if this God thing is going to work. I’d done way too much, and in my mind, I had gone way off the deep end. There was no redemptive values for me at all. I wasn’t worthy. Although I knew that something had happened that day, I certainly didn’t feel like God could restore me."
He saught out an old friend from camp who had become a pastor. Within a few days, he had moved in with the pastor and his family.
"He was very broken and searching and really didn’t know what to do with his life," says Pastor Daryl Blank. "I knew our church would offer grace and love, and he needed that ."
Jeff says, "What they did is just what Jesus would have done. He didn’t look at my past. He didn’t look at what I was doing, how I was acting, He just loved me. They wrapped their arms around me and loved me and took care of me beyond what I could even possibly imagine. That meant everything. That was confirmation that grace was real."
Jeff spent his days reading the Bible and listening to worship music. Before long, he noticed something different.
"Over the next several days, I’d wake up in the morning with this worship song in my head. It was always a different one. It was just like I was being washed from the inside out. My mind was being purified, and all those images were going away. It completely washed my mind. I had no recollection of anything I’d produced, or any of those images it was gone. It was like He had used that music and stuff I’d read and cleansed me and made me new, pour me out and start again. That’s the point where I said, 'Wow, He can fix me? Me, with the mess and the millions of lives that I’ve touched in a very very negative way.' But He still loves me."
Jeff was sentenced to a year in prison. He used the time to study the Bible and pray. After his release he used his Internet development skills and started a new website Godbeat.tv. He says, "Instead of sharing filth, He’s given me an opportunity to share God’s love and put it in as many homes as we can. It’s my personal mission of redemption. It’s like, ‘God, You’ve given me these skills. Let's use them for Your glory instead of Your destruction.'"
Jeff says he has experienced the love, mercy and grace of God.
"My life was a disaster. I was a drug-addicted, alcoholic pornographer that ruined millions of lives. He’s taken my life and turned it around. He loves me in spite of my mess. I’m still growing and I’m still learning. Every day He’s chipping off a little chip of the mess I’d made. I know I’ll never be perfect, but He’s taken what Satan meant for evil and turned it into something amazing. Just further proof of God’s amazing grace. The things He can do and the restoration He can make blows my mind still."
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