Nowadays it’s way easier to keep up with the Kardashians than the cast of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Ever since Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of The Bachelorette got canceled this past March, all hell has broken loose in Utah among the women of MomTok. The cast, who had been supportive of Paul’s controversy and mental-health struggles before the cancellation, were appalled at a video leaked in March of Paul throwing a stool at her ex, Dakota Mortensen, that almost hit her young daughter. “I don’t want to judge the person. I’ll judge the mistake,” Jessi Draper, Paul’s closest ally, told Call Her Daddy at the time. “I have a lot of emotions about it, and I’m still processing everything that’s happening. But the safety of human beings, especially children, comes first,” Whitney Leavitt said. “And I don’t want that to be tolerated.”
Season five’s filming was halted and eventually reduced to five episodes instead of the usual ten. Since then, the women have grappled with their relationship with Paul, and most of the cast have ended their friendship with her. But while drama is normally great for reality TV, this kind of fighting is seemingly show-ending, as several cast members have either left the series or are questioning their future participation. Is there enough MomTok to keep the show going? Or will it be a question of whether MomTok can survive this?
Here’s a status report of who’s in and who’s out of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
The woman who made MomTok mainstream is the latest to leave. Paul shared that she will no longer be a part of the show, claiming the other women have been bullying her online over the past few months. “I originally was willing to be removed to let them all continue on with less stress, and I’m back to that point,” Paul wrote in a statement on Instagram on September 21. “Almost the entire cast plus some, going at me … laughing about my kids is disgusting.”
She says she has felt nothing but support from the behind-the-scenes crew, and right now it seems the only cast member she’s close with is Draper, who has expressed nothing but support for Paul throughout the past few months.
Matthews quit the show in the middle of season six, saying she no longer felt comfortable working with Paul. She told production that if Paul was coming back, she was leaving. “I’m not comfortable being a part of something that continues to platform behavior I don’t agree with, especially given my own experience growing up in a home with multiple forms of abuse,” she stated on Instagram on September 14. “This shouldn’t be ‘relatable’ or entertainment in any way. Supporting an ADULT doesn’t mean constantly making excuses for toxic behavior while giving unconditional sympathy and grace with zero accountability or change. I was in that enabling cycle for years, and I’m not going to be a part of that again!” She donated her salary for the season to National Children’s Alliance.
Matthews’s departure got the other cast members, including Taylor, thinking about their next move. In an Instagram Q&A, Taylor said she’ll finish out season six but is undecided about season seven. “It’s such an impossible situation for everyone involved, but I’m finishing out season 6 and then TBD,” she wrote.
Similar to Taylor, Neeley hasn’t figured out her plan. “I am finishing this current season we are filming and then not sure after that,” Neeley wrote in an Instagram reply. Her sister McCall DaPron is on the spinoff, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County, so maybe Neeley will make a surprise appearance there or even move over.
Affleck hasn’t said anything about whether she wants to stay on the show, but she is making an appearance in the upcoming Orange County spinoff. At least she has a backup option in the reality-TV space. In season five, Affleck wanted to branch out into acting and music, but her husband, Zac Affleck, wasn’t as excited about it. He told her that if she had to play a person in a relationship, he would divorce her. “Having this conversation is making me realize I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go after what I actually want,” Jen said in a season-five confessional. “It’s making me really question what our relationship will look like in the future.”
Draper is basically Paul’s only friend left from the show, and she hasn’t said whether she will continue with Mormon Wives. She has made it clear that she doesn’t need the money from the show to survive; she’s a successful business owner — haven’t you seen her house? Regardless, it seems she’s in the reality-TV business for the love of the game and will continue to support Paul. “She’s in a lot of pain. I’m coming out of a relationship where I went through a lot, and we can kind of relate on certain things. So it was almost like we bonded in a way over our exes doing similar things to us and having those shared experiences,” she told Avery Woods on her podcast. “She’s really been there for me through my divorce, checked in on me, and I’ve wanted to be there for her, too. I just feel like, as a friend, you can be there for someone without fully co-signing everything they do.”
Hope hasn’t shared her future Mormon Wives plans. She was the latest cast member to join the show in season two, and as far as we know, she’s all in for season seven. She is the original MomToker, after all.
Engemann was the first cast member to leave, having been demoted from main cast member to recurring in season four. She officially left the show in season five. She has moved on from reality TV to competition shows such as the Unwell Winter Games and The Mob.
Leavitt finished her time on the show after five seasons, becoming the second cast member to leave. She has become a pro at expanding her horizons beyond Utah. She made it to the quarterfinals of Dancing With the Stars last season and made her Broadway debut in Chicago. She’s on the next season of The Traitors and is heading back to Broadway for Just in Time.
