The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives might be known for its twisted drama and fluctuating power dynamics, but if one thing has stayed consistent throughout the three seasons of the Hulu reality show, it’s the wives’ dedication to MomTok.
With TikTok’s rise starting in 2020, influencers built a community on the platform made up of women creating content about their lives as mothers.
Ranging from relatable birth stories to morning routines, TikTok users’ feeds filled up with individual videos from moms across the platform — but one group of Mormon friends from Utah, led by influencer Taylor Frankie Paul, quickly became the most recognizable faces of the movement.
That group of four Mormon mom influencers — Paul, Whitney Leavitt, Mikayla Matthews, and Mayci Neeley — launched the MomTok hashtag in January 2022, coining an official name for the online community that had garnered millions of followers already as they banded together to show off synchronized dance moves and homogeneous styles down to their crop tops and claw clips.
Here, we take a look at the original four faces of MomTok.
Taylor Frankie Paul
Paul, 31, created MomTok and set the internet ablaze in May 2022 by announcing her divorce and exposing a “soft swinging” agreement between her and other MomTok couples to her 3.5 million TikTok followers at the time. The bombshell confession, made after Paul and her husband Tate divorced, sparked speculation over which influencers had participated in the affairs.
“The whole group was intimate with each other,” Paul said on a TikTok livestream at the time. “All of us were pretty open to it and on board for it. Obviously no one was forced. We did this on occasion. We would have parties and everyone by the end of the night would go and do all that.”
Clips of Paul’s stream quickly went viral, infuriating her fellow MomTok members as they deemed her untrustworthy and shunned her, despite the reality stars insisting they weren’t involved.
After getting divorced and moving into her own home with the two children she shares with her ex-husband, Paul began dating Dakota Mortensen and became pregnant with her third child. Now, after ending her romance with Mortensen, Paul has been announced as ABC’s new Bachelorette and is currently filming the upcoming season of the reality dating show.
Whitney Leavitt
Even those unfamiliar with MomTok might recognize Leavitt, 32, from a dancing video she made in the hospital while her baby had RSV in 2021. The video quickly skyrocketed the mom to TikTok fame, where she now has over three million followers.
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Leavitt is currently competing on season 34 of Dancing with the Stars.She has three kids with her husband Conner Leavitt, who she married in 2016.
Mikayla Matthews
Matthews, 25, is an OG MomTok member after first getting pregnant at 16. The influencer has been an advocate for skincare by being open about her struggles with chronic eczema on social media.
She has been married to her husband, Jace Terry, since 2018. They have four kids together.
Mayci Neeley
Neeley, 30, is a newly minted best-selling author for her memoir Told You So and was previously a Division I tennis player at Brigham Young University.
She spoke openly on the show about her in vitro fertilization journey, as she’s currently married with three kids in a blended family to Jacob Neeley.
Over time, the group expanded to include other influencers like Jen Affleck, Demi Engemann, Layla Taylor, and Jessi Ngatikaura, rounding out the eight original cast members that appeared on season one of the show.
Early MomTok influencers Miranda McWhorter and Camille Munday initially declined to be on the show over privacy reasons.
However, McWhorter changed her mind and joined the season two cast after her ex-husband admitted they had been part of the group’s swinging scandal.
After season two ended with a bombshell affair revelation, season three of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives will be released November 13 on Hulu and Disney+.
