Two participants in the forthcoming Selling Sex doc claim to have been misled about the storyline

Text Brit Dawson

Two sex workers featured in Louis Theroux’s upcoming documentary Selling Sex have written an open letter to the BBC, expressing their disappointment with the final edit of the film. Written by Georgina Tyson and Ashleigh Williams, Tyson shared the letter on Twitter, which hits out at Theroux and producers for unfair editing in order to manipulate the show’s narrative. The hour-long film – due to air on BBC Two later this year – will explore the technological side of the sex industry, including how workers use social media and the internet to find potential clients. In the letter, Tyson writes: “Our initial conversations with the production team made us hopeful we could contribute something valuable to the sex work community by helping destigmatise it by sharing our experiences… “(But) the communication and back and forth was relentless with the producer overstepping boundaries and asking us for free labour.”

Open letter to the BBC as a “participant” in this documentary: a thread! pic.twitter.com/NDatofhBFp — baby g (@ggeorginattyson) August 8, 2019

The pair go on to claim that Theroux and his team hadn’t done enough research into the sex industry, despite apparently having a sex worker on the production team, and didn’t respect when Williams needed to leave set in order to meet a client. Although acknowledging that Williams is the focus of the documentary, Tyson – a carer for Williams, who has autism – alleges that anything of value she added to the film was edited out, erasing her voice completely. “I consistently felt silenced throughout the process”, Tyson continues in the letter. “Outing myself as a sex worker to the entire world is a life changing decision and if I’m not speaking about my own sex work which is much different to Ashleigh’s then I’m not contributing anything of value to the sex work community.” Williams also felt she had to justify her autism on numerous occasions to producers, with Theroux reportedly once questioning, “are you sure you’re autistic?” after Williams breaks down when discussing her childhood. In this situation, Tyson also criticises the BBC for “pushing the stereotype of sex workers being sex workers because something bad happened to them.”