Photo: Ashley Rose Ramirez/Disney
“Can MomTok survive this?” It’s the oft-repeated question on the XL-soda-fueled Hulu reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which follows a group of Utah-based Mormon TikTokers dealing with life, love, and the pursuit of waist-length hair extensions. (By the way, the answer is yes: TMZ exclusively reported in early October that the series had been renewed for season two and that filming would begin later in the month. And, yes, the entire cast is said to be returning.) At first glance, it seems like these women have pretty fun, easy lives: They met doing dancing videos on TikTok and now work together to juice their follower numbers and get more increasingly lucrative brand deals. But there is so much going on beneath the surface that now we must ask, “What did these women survive before MomTok?”
A lot, it turns out. While a few of the show’s new stars have just the average young-Mormon-mom problems — divorce, friend drama, really blond husbands — many of the women have backstories dramatic enough to launch a thousand new reality shows. Here’s what you need to know about these women (most of which was not discussed on the show).
Taylor Frankie Paul
Age: 30
TikTok followers: 4.5 million
Marital status: Divorced with three kids
Taylor is the reason the show exists, so her backstory is the most well known. She started “MomTok” by posting dancing videos with other Mormon moms on TikTok during the pandemic, and she blew up in popularity in 2021 when she posted “funny” videos falsely claiming that she was a 50-year-old grandma with twin, 25-year-old daughters. (The fake daughters: Camille Munday and Miranda McWhorter, two MomTokers who declined to join the Hulu show.)
Then, in 2022, Taylor became national news when she revealed on a TikTok Live video that she and her MomTok friends were “soft-swinging” with each other’s husbands. She has since gotten divorced from her first husband, Tate Paul, whom she married when she was 22 years old in 2016. Then she started dating Dakota Mortensen, whom she met after he slid into her DMs; she then had an ectopic pregnancy, got arrested for domestic violence stemming from an altercation with Dakota (the police bodycam footage of which was aired in the series’ pilot), got pregnant again, and gave birth to her third child, a boy named Ever. (Her two older children with her ex-husband are named Indy and Ocean.) Though her relationship with Dakota was not portrayed in the rosiest of lights on the show, the two appear to still be dating.
Mayci Neeley
Age: 29
TikTok followers: 1.6 million
Marital status: Married to Jacob Neeley with two kids
Mayci has one of the more tragic backstories of the group, though it was not detailed on the show. According to what she has shared on TikTok and with Voyage Utah magazine, Neeley got pregnant at age 19 when she was a freshman at the very Mormon Brigham Young University. She planned to marry her boyfriend at the time, but he got into a fatal car accident when she was 14 weeks along. She then had her baby, a son named Hudson, and returned to BYU the next year, where she eventually met her current husband, Jacob. They married in 2018 and had a daughter named Harlow in 2021. In a 2022 TikTok video detailing her journey, she told her followers, “It always gets better, I promise.”
Mikayla Matthews
Age: 24
TikTok followers: 2.6 million
Marital status: Married to Jace Terry with three kids
Mikayla was not featured much on this season of the show, but she did acknowledge one interesting fact about her backstory during a talking-head interview: She got pregnant with her first child, a boy named Beckham, when she was 16 years old. A detail that went unsaid, however, is that her boyfriend at the time, Jace Terry, was 21. Technically, their relationship was legal in Utah thanks to the state’s “Romeo and Juliet law,” which states that 16- and 17-year-olds can consent to sex with partners who are less than seven years older than them.
Mikayla and Jace got married when Beckham was 6 months old, and they went on to have two more children named Haven and Tommie. I don’t think Jace said one single word out loud on this season of the show, so I’m hoping we hear some kind of explanation from him on a potential second season.
Layla Taylor
Age: 23
TikTok followers: 240,000
Marital status: Divorced with two kids
Layla was the only single cast member on the show this season — she got divorced from her husband Clay Wessel in 2023. The ex-couple has two sons, Oliver and Maxwell, who were not featured on the show (probably due to the divorce). How is a 23-year-old divorced with two kids already? Well, Layla said she got married quickly at age 19 after finding out she was pregnant with her first son.
Layla is also the only Mormon convert on the show: She revealed in a talking-head interview that she converted in high school in order to fit in more with her peers. She was not featured much this season, but it looks like she is preparing to make a bigger appearance on a potential season two: She recently revealed that she had six cosmetic procedures in the span of four months, including a boob job, a nose job, a tummy tuck, chin filler, lip filler, and Botox. That’s the Utah way.
Demi Engemann
Age: 29
TikTok followers: 665,000
Marital status: Married to Bret Engemann with one daughter and two stepsons
Considering her backstory, it’s a wonder Engemann hasn’t been on reality TV before. Her current husband, Bret Engemann, was formerly married to Real Housewives of Salt Lake City member Angie Harrington, and he was scheduled to appear on Clare Crawley’s season of The Bachelorette before he started dating Demi. Demi, meanwhile, was previously married to a man named Blake Corbin, and according to a video she posted on TikTok, she and Blake were the ones who initially submitted Bret to be on The Bachelorette. Then, she and Blake got divorced, she started dating Bret, and he backed out of The Bachelorette. Cute!
As Demi mentioned on the show, Bret is 16 years her senior. She recently revealed on TikTok that she first met him when she was 9 years old and he was an adult married to Angie. So that’s also a detail about her life.
Jessi Ngatikaura
Age: 32
TikTok followers: 472,000
Marital status: Married to Jordan Ngatikaura with two kids and one stepdaughter
Jessi, a hairstylist who owns the JZ Styles salon, did not discuss her personal life much on the show. But she does have some drama in her past that redditors are fascinated by. She was previously married to a guy named Zach (“JZ Styles,” she once explained on Instagram, is a tribute to herself, Zach, and Harry Styles). They split up sometime in 2019, and then she got together with her current husband, Jordan Ngatikaura. Jessi got pregnant and gave birth in early 2020, and she married Jordan a few months after that. She was already a successful hair influencer when all of this was happening, and fans became obsessive about determining the paternity of her child. Jessi has not commented directly on the issue and has since had another baby with Jordan. Maybe she’ll tell the story next season.
Whitney Leavitt
Age: 31
TikTok followers: 2.1 million
Marital status: Married to Conner Leavitt with two kids
The only thing you really need to know about Whitney, the self-proclaimed “villain” of the show, is that she filmed a dancing video for TikTok while her baby was in the hospital with RSV in 2021. She discusses this incident multiple times on the show, but just in case you haven’t seen it, there it is.
Holy shit pic.twitter.com/ZGotuvuI6z
— sandhya (@dollarbillbluez) December 19, 2021
Whitney also revealed on the show that her husband, Conner Leavitt, was on Tinder during their marriage, but that they had reconciled. And now she’s pregnant with her third child!
Jen Affleck
Age: 25
TikTok followers: 1.4 million
Marital status: Married to Zac Affleck with two kids
Jen’s absolutely dismal marriage to Zac Affleck, a distant cousin of Ben Affleck, was a major story line on the show this season. What was she doing before she ended up married to a super-blond gambling addict who can’t stand the thought of her attending a Chippendales show in Vegas? Unfortunately, not much: Jen met Zac on the Mormon dating app Mutual when she was just 18 years old and married him a year later. Before the show, however, she was most famous for dancing on her kitchen counter, which is fun.
This post has been updated with the latest season-two news.
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