What began as “Mormon aesthetics without Latter-day Saint values” has become something uglier: a public demonstration of what happens when self-fulfillment, sexual autonomy, and internet fame are pursued at the expense of covenants, chastity, marriage, and children.
Yesterday, production of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season 5 was halted, and The Bachelorette’s 22nd season—slated to be led by Secret Lives star Taylor Frankie Paul—was canceled. These decisions followed after entertainment website TMZ leaked a video of a domestic altercation involving Paul in 2023. In the footage, Paul is seen in her home throwing three metal barstools at Dakota Mortensen, her then-boyfriend and the father of her youngest child. Paul’s daughter, who was six years old at the time, is also seen lying nearby on the couch—apparently sleeping at the beginning, then awakened by the chaos—and cried out for her mother to stop. A subsequent criminal indictment indicated that the child was struck in the head by one of the stools, resulting in a painful goose egg.
TMZ also reported that earlier this week, both Mortensen and Paul’s ex-husband (and father of her two older children), Tate Paul, allegedly filed new orders of protection against Paul, with Mortensen requesting sole custody of their two-year-old son.
Most Latter-day Saint commentary on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which chronicles the dramatic lives of a Utah-based social media group of influencers self-dubbed “#MomTok,” tends to focus on how these women are not devout and do not represent the values or teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
What stands out even more is how protective Latter-day Saint teachings are.
But as I have written previously, what stands out even more is how protective Latter-day Saint teachings are—not only against the harmful effects of the sexual revolution, but against a digital culture that rewards the public monetization of its fallout. The women of Secret Lives are not simply casting off Latter-day Saint expectations around sex, marriage, and family. They are doing so in front of cameras for followers, brand deals, ratings, and relevance. The newest seasons only make that clearer. Disney’s own framing of season 4 emphasizes the stars’ virality, “real-world opportunities,” fractures, and mounting instability.
The show is packed with parties, events, and a heavy focus on sexual freedom. The women openly posture against traditional norms around sex and gender while continuing to borrow the visual language of a faith they seem increasingly uninterested in living. This is no surprise, considering MomTok only rose to fame after a scandal involving some of the married members swinging with each other’s spouses — and most of those marriages are now over.
Yet the show’s cast continues to blame the majority of their dysfunction on “church culture” and “Mormon expectations.” The show’s on-again, off-again villain, Zac Affleck (who certainly has his issues), is often vilified for offering seemingly sensible, family-oriented commentary such as “Hollywood isn’t conducive to a healthy marriage” or “I don’t want you to feel mom guilt, but our kids do miss you…and it’s hard for me to fill that void with them even though I try.” This is the same Zac who deferred medical school to be a stay-at-home dad so his wife could appear on Dancing with the Stars and further pursue an entertainment career. Jen insists that “he had his turn” to pursue his career, and now it’s her turn, “and he knows that and should support that.”
The women frequently say that their religious upbringing taught them to be subjugated to their husbands’ whims. This is an obvious misunderstanding of The Family: A Proclamation to the World, which teaches that fathers are “responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families.” The clear distinction is that doctrine teaches that career is a means of protecting and providing for the needs of the family, not the desires of the individual. While some sense of meaning and personal fulfillment can be found in many careers, research consistently finds that people derive their greatest sense of meaning from relationships—particularly family relationships. Unfortunately, the husbands and boyfriends in the show are often painted as adversaries or competitors of the women, rather than as partners they love and care for. Even stranger, the women seem to believe the proper correction to what they see as oppressive gender roles is simply to reverse them.
As the show has progressed, the so-called liberation of these women appears to have yielded very little joy or true freedom. Newer seasons are no longer just about “Mormon women behaving badly.” They are increasingly a portrait of emotional affairs, fractured marriages, public humiliation, eating disorders, body-image collapse, postpartum distress, and relationships strained to the breaking point, with nearly all of the cast members in personal and couples therapy. What is being sold as liberation looks, more and more, like despair.
Seasons 3 and 4 did not reveal a cruelty of traditional sexual morality; instead, they revealed the inability of self-centered sexual ethics to build anything stable in its place. Unfortunately, far too many viewers have bought into a worldview that claims women in the West are still largely oppressed, and thus feel they are doing their part to smash the patriarchy as they cheer on the ladies in their quest for so-called liberation.
The problem with broadcasting this drama is that the content does not merely document disorder. It rewards it. Reality television and social media incentivize family breakdown. Betrayal, sexual chaos, emotional oversharing, and the performance of self-liberation are highly marketable. Once marriage trouble becomes a storyline, sexual impropriety becomes brand identity, and personal instability becomes a platform, the incentives tilt in a very dark direction. The women of Secret Lives are not just reaping the consequences of rejecting clear moral norms. They are doing so inside a machine that profits from the damage.
The so-called liberation of these women appears to have yielded very little joy.
Fans of the show ignore the clear signs of dysfunction and abuse and the stars’ obvious abandonment of their children (until the children can be used as an excuse to throw a party). Whatever adults choose for themselves, children do not choose the instability, exposure, and humiliation that come with having family breakdown turned into content. That Paul was arrested for assault and domestic violence against Mortensen in front of one of her children has been a matter of public record for over three years, and the frequent subject of hushed conversations on Reddit, but Disney continued on with both Secret Lives and then The Bachelorette because, well, the women are hot, and far too many viewers are comfortable consuming the meltdowns of mentally unwell celebrities.
Even the cast members themselves have frequently expressed concern about Paul’s erratic behavior. NBC News reported yesterday that cast members met with ABC executives earlier this month to express concerns about continuing the show if Paul remained involved. In the meeting, one of the cast members reportedly asked Rob Mills, the executive vice president of unscripted and alternative entertainment at Walt Disney Television, if he’s “aware she’s hurt a child?” Mills’ alleged reply? “I don’t know a lot, nor do I want to know too much.”
We have, of course, seen the exploitation of unwell but “sexually liberated” women before—it’s a familiar pattern to those paying attention. In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, journalist Louise Perry argues that Western sexual culture in the twenty-first century “promotes the interests of the Hugh Hefners of the world at the expense of the Marilyn Monroes. And the influence of liberal feminism means that too many women don’t recognize this truth, blithely accepting Hefner’s claim that all of the downsides of the new sexual culture are just ‘a small price to pay for personal freedom.’” Indeed, the commodified lives of women like Monroe, Anna Nicole Smith, Amanda Bynes, Britney Spears, and others have much in common with Paul’s, and one can only hope that she gets help before reaching the same breaking point these women did.
Whatever sympathy one rightly feels for Taylor Frankie Paul as a human being, it is difficult to watch the public trajectory of her life without concluding that it has the shape of a spiral: relational chaos, legal trouble, domestic conflict, children caught in the blast radius, and a complicit fanbase eager to turn every bit of it into entertainment.
The most revealing moments on the show are often the accidental ones.
The most revealing moments on the show are often the accidental ones. In a rare moment of clarity, Paul reflected in season 2 on her relationship with Mortensen: “In our faith we were taught to wait (to have sex) for the person we want to marry and end up with, and I feel like … if I hadn’t been sleeping with (Dakota) early on, I don’t think that I would have been as hurt. And that’s why it’s a guideline — to prevent these types of things from happening.”
That line is haunting in light of everything that followed.
Paul, through representatives, has said the newly leaked video omits context and that she has suffered abuse as well. But even allowing for dispute over context, the broader picture is grim: this is not empowerment. It is family breakdown, made public and then repackaged as content. What the show unintentionally reveals is that discarded moral boundaries do not disappear without cost. Someone always pays.
But there is always hope. Though the MomTok ladies often display only elementary knowledge of Latter-day Saint doctrine, I pray they remember the most important doctrine—that of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The same gospel that teaches chastity, fidelity, and sacrifice also teaches mercy. It teaches that through Christ broken things can be mended, and that people who have wandered very far can still come home.
