The swinging scandal tearing the Mormon church apart

It was the revelation that rocked one of America’s most well-known churches – and has become the subject of a major new reality show

The first episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives begins with a list of rules. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is to be no swearing, no caffeine, no alcohol, no tattoos, and no sex before marriage. Chastity is encouraged. The husband is the head of the household, and you should have children “by the time you’re 21.”
Enter 28-year-old Taylor Frankie Paul, one of a cast of modern Mormon women who aren’t afraid to break the rules. “We were raised to be these housewives for the men, serving their every desire,” she says. “I’m like… f–k this. So I created MomTok.” 
For the uninitiated, Paul is part of a social media super-group of influencers living in Salt Lake City, Utah, with a combined online following of tens of millions. They are the founding members of an unexpectedly popular internet subculture called #MomTok. 
The movement started in 2020 with a group of young Mormon mothers doing coordinated dance routines on TikTok, with guest appearances from their husbands and children. No one could have predicted its ending with an explosive sex scandal two years later which tore the group apart, along with at least two of the marriages within it, and became one of the biggest dramas in social media’s recent history. 
Right from the start, the women appeared to break all the Latter Day Saints’ (LDS) conventions. Rightly or wrongly, the Church is known for its social conservatism and archaic rules, especially for women, who are not eligible for priesthood. Members are encouraged to avoid “unwholesome” music and to dress modestly. But Paul and her collaborators, Miranda McWhorter (1.1 million followers), Camille Mundy (1.7 million), Whitney Leavitt (2.1 million), Mayci Neeley (1.4 million) and Mikayla Matthews (2.5 million), danced and lip-synched to rap and pop music in coordinated crop tops. 
They had all married young and set out to raise large families, as per the Church’s cultural diktat, but they also partied, danced and refused to play the role of a submissive Mormon wife.
As their fame and online audience grew, so too did their ranks. Other lithe, long-haired women clad in Lululemon joined their troupe, usually with a brood of young children in tow. (All the “moms” had children young – Matthews, now aged 24, had her first child aged 16.) They monetised their social media profiles and some became the breadwinners in their families. 
Despite pushing against the restrictions of the LDS, Paul was the face of the Church for many Gen Z social media users. She spawned a content juggernaut that reached millions of non-Mormons around the world – no bad thing when, by outside estimates, the LDS has lost one million adult members over the past 15 years, mirroring a broader decline in Christian faith across America. Then it all came crashing down with a controversy that shook the Church.
At the beginning of her social media career, Paul, the ringleader of the group, made recurrent jokes in her videos, often seemingly at the Church’s expense. She said that she and the other moms were “sister wives,” that she was their mother and their children were her grandchildren, and that they were swingers. One of those jokes turned out to be fact, not fiction. 
In the summer of 2022, Paul was catapulted from TikTok fame to the mainstream when she posted a video lip-synching to a Miley Cyrus song announcing her impending divorce from her then-husband, Tate. It was captioned: “In my twenties, getting divorced, started therapy, living on my own for the first time ever along with two little kids.” The plot thickened when she posted another cryptic video of her packing moving boxes, writing: “My entire life falling apart… and I can’t even speak on why… without bringing them all down with me.” 
Cue fevered speculation from her followers. Paul subsequently explained that her friendship group had been spouse swapping or, as she called it, “soft-swinging”. They had an agreement which opened their relationships up on certain terms, as long as their respective partners were aware. But Paul had violated that agreement with another of the husbands in the group, she explained in a video. Without naming names, she said: “The whole group was intimate with each other… No one was innocent. Everybody has hooked up with everyone in the situation.” 
The trouble didn’t end there. By February 2023, Paul had a new boyfriend, Dakota Mortensen. After a girls night out, she was arrested at home for domestic violence in the presence of a child after a drunken row with him. She pled guilty to aggravated assault in August 2023 and has since been documenting her sobriety. In a video posted in February, she said: “I am one year sober today… As awful and embarrassing as [the arrest] was, it has brought me where I am today.”
Reality TV executives saw the sex-laden plotline that had divided the group and the LDS as an opportunity to strike gold. As of this week, the Mormon moms are back on a screen, but this time it’s television and they have a bigger audience than ever before. In The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which follows eight of these influencers in the wake of the scandal, their social media careers have been recast as a feminist act of rebellion.
Paul now says she was “pressured” into marrying straight out of school. “It’s kind of a theme with our church… kind of what the problem is. Everyone is getting married before their brains even develop,” says another character in the show. The cast includes Momtokkers old and new, including Jen Affleck, whose husband is the cousin of Hollywood actors Casey and Ben.
The synopsis reads: “The scandalous world of a group of Mormon mom influencers implodes when they get caught in the midst of a swinging sex scandal that makes international headlines. Now, their sisterhood is shook to its core. Faith, friendship and reputations are all on the line.” 
The relationships are understandably strained. After Paul’s revelation in 2022, the other members of the group were quick to distance themselves from her claims, unfollowing her on social media and posting video statements to say they were not involved. But it was too late; if the comment sections are anything to go by, many didn’t believe them. Instead, the story caught fire, making tabloid headlines around the world.
The original group of MomTokkers was splintered by the controversy; Mundy and McWhorter are no longer friends with Paul and declined to join the cast of the docudrama re-telling the story. Another cast member, Demi Engemann, says in the first episode of the show that she was “at the parties and didn’t even know it was going on”.
Yet most of the cast insist their faith has survived the ordeal. Despite capitalising on their Mormon identity (and the overlapping “tradwife” online sphere) for a long time they rarely, if ever, addressed their religion – although they also never rejected or left the church outright. Some critics, meanwhile, said the crew weren’t really Mormon at all. But more recently, they have attempted to prove that isn’t the case – at least two have posted videos “proving” they are religious, by showing their copies of the Book of Mormon or discussing their temple recommends (a certificate that allows you to enter a Mormon temple). 
The LDS maintained a dignified silence on all this rather undignified drama until The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives was announced, but since then, the show has proved controversial and drawn heavy criticism from Church members, especially in Utah itself. One cast member, Jessi Ngatikaura, said in an interview: “Our community’s been a little bit harsh on us… I hope people watch it and realise [sic] we’re just real women showing our struggles and our sins and that we’re doing that so other people can relate to us.”
In a rare piece of “commentary” on its website, which does not explicitly name the MomTok scandal, the Church itself said that “like other prominent global faith communities” it “often finds itself the focus of the attention of the entertainment industry.”
“Some portrayals are fair and accurate, but others resort to stereotypes or gross misrepresentations that are in poor taste and have real-life consequences for people of faith,” it continues. “While this is not new, a number of recent productions depict lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the Church. We understand the fascination some in the media have with the Church, but regret that portrayals often rely on sensationalism and inaccuracies that do not fairly and fully reflect the lives of our Church members or the sacred beliefs that they hold dear.”
But Paul is going down swinging, in more than one sense of the word. “We’re still Mormon,” she said recently, “whether you like it or not.”
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