A Refresher on the Mormon MomTok Drama

Taylor Frankie Paul’s divorce announcement.

Nearly three years ago, Mormon momfluencer Taylor Frankie Paul hopped on TikTok to tell her 3.5 million followers that she was getting divorced after “soft swinging” with her friend group in Draper, Utah. Paul claimed to have fallen in love with one of the husbands she was swinging with, and other MomTokers scrambled to deny their involvement. Naturally, the entire story blew up, and now, Paul and a few of her Latter-day sisters star in a Hulu show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, inspired by this ordeal. Season one, which premiered this past September, chronicled plenty of drama, including Taylor’s new relationship and the general fallout from the swinging scandal. Now that the second season has premiered, here’s a little refresher on everything that’s happened.

How did this all start?

Before all this, Paul was a staple of Mormon MomTok where she mostly posted dance videos with the occasional appearance from her then-husband, Tate Paul, and their two young kids, Indy and Ocean. She also did choreographed routines with a group of like-minded Mormon TikTok moms, including Camille Munday and Miranda McWhorter, who she often joked were her “sister wives.” (More on them later.)

Of course, that was before May 2022, when she claimed in a livestream that she and her husband had been in an open relationship and had been “soft swinging” with other couples in their friend group — which, in her words, meant that no one went “all the way” together unless their spouses were in the room. “The whole group was intimate with each other,” she said in the video, which was swiftly reposted online. Apparently, Taylor had violated the group’s soft-swapping policies. “To be honest, we had an agreement, like all of us, and I did step out of that agreement,” she said, confessing that she had gone “all the way” with someone in the group. She insisted that it was “a one-time thing” but also admitted that she and the unnamed man “had feelings for each other.”

Taylor said that, in the aftermath of the incident, she was “shunned” by her friends, though she added that “no one was innocent.” She also claimed that there were other people in the group who “had feelings,” presumably for people that were not their spouses. “There are three divorces in our friend group right now,” she claimed. “One not really to do with this situation, but there are two of us who are getting divorced.” At the time, she said the “majority” of MomTok wasn’t involved.

Taylor also said she and Tate were on good terms, and that the swinging incident was “the tip of the iceberg” in the problems that led to their divorce.

Who else was involved in the swinging?

Following Taylor’s video, fans started to speculate that other MomTokers must have been connected to the drama. A number of MomTokers denied the rumors, including Taylor’s bestie Miranda McWhorter and her husband, Chase, who posted a video saying they weren’t involved in the swinging and claiming that Miranda had a falling out with Taylor because Taylor started a rumor that Chase had feelings for her. Camille Munday, who Taylor previously said was never in the swinging crew because she and her husband brought “too much drama,” posted comments on an entirely different influencer’s account saying that she and her husband didn’t swing. Mayci Neeley, Whitney Leavitt, and Victoria Zalic have also posted videos saying they were never involved with swinging.

What happened next?

Taylor spent the next few months posting updates on her life as a newly single mom and controversial TikTok sensation before a new guy, Dakota Mortensen, started appearing in her videos. Despite speculation that Mortensen is the man she swung “all the way with,” she explained in a later video that he slid into her DMs shortly after her swinging drama went down.

In 2023, Paul was arrested on assault and domestic-violence charges after admitting to police that she threw a wooden play set and metal chairs at Mortensen, one of which hit her 5-year-old daughter. She pleaded guilty to one of the charges and agreed to a plea deal in September. In a video posted after the plea deal, she described the incident as “hitting rock bottom” and said it “made me seek help that I wasn’t getting at the time,” adding that she felt “guilt, shameful, and embarrassed.”

Also in September 2023: Paul and Mortensen announced they were expecting a baby together, at which point her account took a hard turn toward pregnancy and postpartum content. In between those, Taylor also posted a few reunion videos with a group she called Mormon MomTok, though her old friends Miranda and Camille didn’t appear on her feed.

So, who made it into season one?

Pretty much everyone Taylor was posting with in the wake of her scandal. (Even in their TikToks, this friend group seemed to be spending quite a bit of their time together with a camera crew close by.) Besides Paul, the cast included Whitney Leavitt, Layla Taylor, Demi Engemann, Jessi Ngatikaura, Mikayla Matthews, and Mayci Neeley. There’s also Jen Affleck, a woman who claims to be married to Ben Affleck’s distant cousin but appears not to have any traceable connection to his family.

Though Leavitt and her husband spent some time hashing out the revelation that he had secretly been on Tinder for the entirety of their marriage, and he also claimed to have a porn addiction, everyone on the show denied having been involved in the swinging (except for Taylor).

Then what are we even doing here?

A lot, actually. Even without rumors that they’re making out with each other’s husbands, the Mormon women of Utah found plenty to feud about — the show’s first season focused mostly on Paul’s battle with Leavitt for the crown of MomTok queen bee. Leavitt left the group chat at the end of the season, purportedly with plans to get into homesteading (yep), but it doesn’t seem like that idea really got off the ground. As of the show’s second season, she’s renting a home near family in St. George, telling Vulture she thinks she “fell more in love with the idea of homesteading” than the actual thing since it’s “so hard to find land where you can have chickens in a 15-minute radius to a Target.”

Also with the arrival of season two, we finally have another survivor of the soft-swinging scandal onscreen. Miranda McWhorter — remember her, Taylor’s ex-BFF who was closely tied to the original MomTok drama? — enters the fray this season, fresh off her divorce from Chase. In an interview with People earlier this month, McWhorter suggested she might not have been telling the whole truth when she and her now ex-husband denied being involved in the swinging.

“I think a lot of Taylor’s frustrations were with me not being totally authentic and truthful,” she said. “I was just like, ‘Well, everyone wasn’t hooking up with everyone,’ and I just left it at that. I get why that would feel unfair to her. I think there was a lot of fear, guilt, and shame that played a role in that for me, things that I needed to address in my personal life between my marriage, my religion, all of that.”

So, what else did we miss between seasons one and two?

A lot more babies, for one thing. Jen Affleck is currently pregnant with her third child — which she told People she found out about after briefly separating from her husband, Zac. The beginning of season two shows them living apart, but since then (apparently with the help of ketamine therapy), they’ve gotten back together.

Also pregnant with her third is Mayci Neeley, and with her fourth, Mikayla Matthews.

And is Taylor still with that guy?

Probably not, but maybe? Ahead of the season-two premiere, Taylor told People how her relationship with Dakota is going really “depends on the day.” She said they’re “individually working on ourselves and trying to heal, for not only ourselves but for our son,” but added, “never say never.”

The sodas can only get bigger from here.

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