Don’t let anyone tell you MomTok is boring. Last week, the mormon mommy influencers of Utah saw their friend group (and at least one marriage) implode. Thankfully, numerous TikTokers were on hand to break down the juicy drama.
At the center of the drama is Taylor Frankie Paul and her husband Tate. Paul’s TikTok has 3.5 million followers who watch videos of herding a variety of dance challenges, or her daughter putting on make-up. She also made a lot of content with a small group of moms from her Utah neighborhood who claimed to have made a new “Utah Content House” together.
The drama kicked off when Paul announced that she and her husband were separating. In one video, she claimed that her “life was falling apart.” Another showed her packing boxes and expressing excitement about co-parenting with Tate.
Her soon-to-be-ex-husband seemed less excited: he removed all evidence of Taylor off his Instagram. Around the same time, multiple other moms from their tight-knit content-creation crew unfollowed the influencer and even allegedly liked comments that hinted at her cheating on Tate.
This was all very basic “two influencers break up a content house” drama until Paul took to TikTok Live to explain what happened. She claimed that most of the couples in the group were “soft swingers,” meaning that they get drunk and parent swap without going all the way (unless both spouses are also in the room). The reason for her divorce was that she had broken that rule with one of the husbands in the group.
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Some followers have cast doubt on the story. Many believe that the Paul family’s entire life is scripted and pointed to past instances of her making up stories for clout, like when she posted a clearly joking video claiming that she was 50 and that two of the other MomTokers in her crew were her 25-year-old twin daughters (Paul is in her late twenties).
Mostly, this has stirred up a debate about whether or not swinging is common in the Mormon community. Mormon podcaster Meg Morley Walter told Rolling Stone that the specific town these moms are from is a known swinger enclave, full of swinger hangouts and signs. The swinging community also skews younger than most around the country because Mormons tend to marry quite young, inevitably growing restless because of the few sexual partners they’ve had.
“When you consider how many Mormons don’t get married until they finish a two-year-mission and/or a degree from BYU, there’s a lot of sexually deprived twenty somethings,” another former Mormon says. “Naturally this leads to couples wanting to experiment as they get older and more comfortable with one another.”
On this episode of Don’t Let This Flop, hosts Brittany Spanos and Ej Dickson discuss not only the Mormon MomTok drama, but also how cringe corporate Pride merch is, the moral panic around monkeypox, Florence Pugh and Olivia Rodrigo’s rumored romances and crown a Jackass as our Himbo of the Week.
DLTF is released Wednesdays on all audio streaming platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher and more.