The Many Lives of Whitney Leavitt

Whitney Leavitt is in the driver’s seat of her Kia SUV, waiting in line at Swig, a drive-through soda shop on East Tabernacle Street in St. George, Utah. It’s the watering hole for practicing Mormons, the Paddy’s Pub for people who aren’t allowed to drink but are allowed to get a sugar high. “We’re not huge soda drinkers,” Leavitt tells me over the murmurs of her three kids seated behind us in bulky carseats. Billy, born in a television episode airing this spring, quietly babbles as Sedona, 4 and precocious, manages her younger brother Liam, 2. Leavitt’s husband, Conner, is squeezed behind them in the SUV’s third row. “But when I have that soda craving,” Leavitt continues, “I’ll go once every other week.”

The Leavitts are living in a modest rental house in a Stepford-y organized development in St. George, a four-hour drive from Salt Lake City, where Leavitt and her family tape the reality show in which she stars, Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. It’s a sunny, mild January day, and Leavitt’s guiding me through my first Swig order like it’s a professional consultation. The menu has “refreshers” without caffeine, “revivers” with caffeine, and “dirty sodas” (I don’t ask). “Don’t mess up the order,” Leavitt advises cheerily. I consider Swig’s Mango Breeze; Conner suggests the Watermelon Sugar. “No, the Riptide,” Leavitt decides after I tell her my favorite non-speciality soda is Sprite. Conner calls out from basically the trunk that he concurs.

Leavitt’s order? “The Fighter.” It’s almost too obvious. Before she was cast on Secret Lives, the 31-year-old and her fellow zillennial Mormon mom friends had accrued massive TikTok followings with their choreographed dance videos. Leavitt became a particularly controversial figure after posting and defending a video of herself dancing in front of Liam, then a newborn hospitalized with RSV. Later, a “soft-swinging” scandal in the Utah Mormon community (involving group makeouts, emotional affairs — everything but “full-on” sex) would make all the women infamous, particularly former MomTok leader Taylor Frankie Paul. When the first season of the show premiered last September, it skyrocketed the eight MomTokers to Housewives-level reality stardom. But in a sea of identical bronde soft-wave extensions, Leavitt’s blonde bob, flipped upward at the ends, seemed to make her uniquely vilifiable, as if her hair announced her ambitions regarding the show’s central questions: Who will take over MomTok now that Paul had been scandalized? Cue the oft-memed dun-dun-dun ultimatum repeated several times every episode. Can MomTok even survive this?

Paul kicks off the pilot recounting the drama that nuked her marriage and nearly her influencing career and ends the episode with aggravated assault charges against the boyfriend no one likes. “We used to get together all the time because someone was planning these content-creation days,” Leavitt explains, “and this person is now going through very traumatic and serious situations in her personal life.” Leavitt was concerned for Paul but also for the group’s future posting cadence. (For the record, the rest of the original Secret Lives cast claims to be guilty by association; they’ve never admitted to swinging of any kind.) “It’s very much my personality. If someone’s not stepping up, then I’m going to be the next one to be like, ‘Okay, what are we doing? What’s the plan?’” Leavitt says.

Making videos for MomTok is either a crucial part of Leavitt’s career or an afterthought. She vacillates in conversation, frustrated that the women don’t film together anymore — “Because yeah, it’s still a business. We still need to make money” — but cognizant of the reality that, as the third-most-followed member of the group (Paul is the first; Mikayla Matthews, who frequently posts about her struggles with eczema and autoimmune issues, is second), she doesn’t really need their accounts’ reach to succeed. “At the end of the day, I am making more money just focusing on my individual career,” she says. “And honestly, when we would get together, it was less business for me and more like, let’s go have some fun. I love making content and then having it come to life and then go viral. It was like a drug to me.”

And yet Leavitt is positioned as chief antagonist from the start. Onscreen, she’s miffed at Paul for getting MomTok mixed in with the swinging scandal, and as she rallies to become their new head organizer, makes her opinions known to castmates behind Paul’s back. Later, in a group hang when she apologizes for her behavior toward Paul and attempts to explain the marriage problems that drove her decisions, Paul announces that she’s currently suffering through a miscarriage. A teary moment turns tense as the ladies’ attention all shift to Paul; Leavitt’s been upstaged. Excusing herself from events that feature the other Mormon Wives becomes a pattern thereafter: She skips Paul’s baby shower, she misses the launch party of her close friend Mayci Neeley’s business, she dramatically exits the group chat. When she does show up, she’s offering mortifying gag gifts and further alienating herself. The season ends with Leavitt announcing she’s trading MomTok for homesteading.

Even her own mother, according to one of Leavitt’s confessionals, thought it looked like she was running away from her villain edit. “Towards the end of the season, I was venting to my friend. I was like, ‘Why do I feel like I’m the bad guy? I don’t know why I feel like I’m the bad guy,’” she recalls. “She’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Don’t be worried.’ None of us had done this before.” Does she think other cast members saw how her story was shaking out? “I bet they did, for sure.”

In person, Leavitt is eager to discuss herself. She grew up too Mormon to drink alcohol or swear, but now she’ll punctuate her observations and frustrations with the latter. She talks casually about money; she makes more from her social accounts than she does from the show, even after negotiating a contract that would bring her back for a second season. She acknowledges the hate on the internet and divulges which of her castmates read Reddit threads about themselves. “Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the women even comment on it, try to create a narrative from it. I’m being dead serious,” she says. “Some of those women are chronically online.”

A traditional villain returning for another season might strive for an arc that brings her back into everyone’s good graces. But Leavitt doesn’t seem in a rush to make things “right.” If season one was about whether or not MomTok could survive the swinging-scandal fallout, season two, she says, is about declaring it has and asking, “Can we finally move past it?” When the series picks back up, it seems like they can’t. Leavitt is still out of the group chat but returns to IRL group hangs. On camera, her reception is chilly. She becomes the go-to talk-to for whoever is out of the group’s favor that day. In nearly all of her scenes from the first episodes, filmed just before she gave birth to Billy, she’s assuaging the latest MomToker to replace her in the hot seat. “I know what it feels like to be separated from the group, and almost like when you’re put on an island,” she explains. “I never want people to feel that way. I want to put my arms around them and be like, ‘No, you’re so loved.’” Still, when I ask if it’s strange that she and Paul still don’t appear to follow one another online, Leavitt says that things go down in season two that justify it. Paul, she makes a point of telling me, “does a good job staying relevant.”

St. George is much smaller than Salt Lake. There are a lot of quaint shops next to new strip-mall developments. The house Leavitt rents is largely undecorated save for the kids’ rooms, some Polaroids stuck to the refrigerator door, and a painting of the Mormon temple in Provo where she and Conner were married. The kitchen, where Liam’s toddler toilet sits next to an island, is a perfectly bland background for videos. Leavitt’s older sister moved to St. George first, then Leavitt decided she liked it enough to move there too. (Moving, Leavitt says with a dead-serious face, is her “addiction.” In two years and through two pregnancies, she’s moved four times. “I tell people I’m too good at it now. I’m like, you want me to pick up and move tomorrow? I could probably do it in a day.”) When she told her parents she was relocating, they decided to sell her childhood home and buy property in St. George as well.

“Utah County is growing so much. I just wasn’t loving it as much,” Leavitt says. “I almost felt like I wanted that separation from the show.” After errands, we head to her kids’ preschool. When we pull up, Leavitt stops mid-sentence as a tween approaches the car. “I just — what are you doing here?” The girl is her youngest sister, accompanying Leavitt’s oldest sister Haley, 18 months Leavitt’s senior, whose kids also attend the preschool. Haley eyes me icily from the curb. “My older sister and I are very, very different. She’s introverted. I feel like I’m more extroverted,” Leavitt explains. “We’re just different in everything.”

“Whitney’s a girl’s girl, loves girly things,” Conner summarizes for me later. “Haley doesn’t care too much about that. Whitney loves attention. Haley would reject it.”

Leavitt is disarmingly matter-of-fact in the face of my attention, continuing to rattle off a dizzying number of biographical revelations once we return to the house. As she folds onesies and places tiny graphic tees on hangers, she explains that she is in fact one of five biological siblings, and her parents fostered at least a half-dozen other kids throughout her childhood. “My mom was so busy going to court or group therapy with these other kids. I had to do everything myself. If something wasn’t done, I couldn’t wait for someone to tell me to go do it,” she says. “Not all my siblings are like that, so I don’t know if it did come from how I grew up. Maybe it’s that God gave me that part of my personality.”

God also gave Leavitt a dance background. She danced competitively throughout grade school. (On a scale from one to Dance Moms, she says the culture was “a ten.”) At Brigham Young University, she studied fine arts with a dance emphasis. She totaled so many cars back then that she became too expensive to insure, so she rode a bike to class every day. She then backpacked around Europe for two months before moving to Uganda for four months. In the early 2010s, she lived in Georgia for her Mormon mission, where she became close with Conner’s family before the two even met. (Mormon missionaries are matched with groups of local Mormons, and one of those family’s was Conner’s. “It’s just coincidence. How cool is that? I remember being in his home,” Leavitt says. The two didn’t meet until 2015, when they both agreed to be wingmen on a double date with two others who bailed.) She worked at a plastic surgeon’s office. (Every morning she lays under a $1,000 LED light mask for 30 minutes before her kids wake up.) When she got pregnant with Sedona, she downloaded TikTok. That she’s a reality-TV star is only her latest chapter.

And she’s good at it. “I want to make great TV,” Leavitt admits, perhaps not unaware of the fact that in a world of reality television dominated by The Traitors and House of Villains, the fan least-favorite can have career longevity. “We made great TV and it was a great season. It took off, and yeah, I mean, it’s also my job.” Her biggest reservation about continuing as a reality star isn’t her edit, she says, but about the real friends she says are being demoted to co-workers in the process. “It’s hard to differentiate between what’s real and what’s not. That’s something that Mayci and I had to navigate and still don’t really feel like we’re there,” she says.

Leavitt filmed many of her season-two scenes with Miranda McWhorter, a MomTok OG turned Secret Lives “friend-of.” McWhorter was friends with Paul and named in the soft-swinging scandal, and the other women are skeptical of McWhorter’s reasons for agreeing to appear on the show now. Does she want to cash in now that they’ve weathered the storm? Leavitt says she’s also become close with Demi Engemann, the recipient of Leavitt’s Fruity Pebbles–themed gag gift in season one. “It might be a bit shocking, I think, to viewers. But again, I feel like Demi was put on an island, and I’m just like, ‘No, you’re not alone.’” With her friendships now, Leavitt says, “I’ve protected my vulnerability a little bit more than I had in the beginning. Maybe it needs to be more of a business mindset rather than friendships.”

Back in St. George, Leavitt says she is in a “no-new-friends era.” She seems happy to live in a small town where everyone has heard of her reality-TV show, but no one admits to watching it. (Except for a neighbor, apparently. “Our next-door neighbor thought we were swingers!” Leavitt cackles.) Here, Conner gets to work from home. His managers at a newly formed hedge fund are all in Dubai, so his schedule, like Leavitt’s, is flexible enough for them to split child care. He regularly features in her videos and putters in the kitchen as we hang out in their living room.

I ask Conner what his wife of nine years is like as a director. “Hoooooo,” Leavitt groans playfully. “Don’t ask Conner that question!”

“Amazing, amazing wife,” he begins. “But you can tell she grew up in the fine arts. She’s like, ‘Chin up, back straight. You’re off half a beat.’ And I’m trying! I’m sweating!”

Part of what made filming the first season so unmooring for Leavitt — and a plotline that seems largely absent from season two — is how often the darkest chapter of her marriage was revisited. Their sudden move to Hawaii in July 2022 wasn’t because MomTok was in shambles, but because Conner had a porn addiction and secretly swiped on Tinder throughout their marriage. (They only stayed in Hawaii for two months, moving back once the show began production in early 2023.) On camera Conner talked about being sexually assaulted as a child, which he believes led to his porn addiction. “Conner and I had talked about it before and I said this would be very vulnerable. I know that a lot of people could relate to our story and it could help a lot of people,” she says. “In the end, I wanted it to be Conner’s decision. I felt like it was his story more than mine, even though it did affect me.”

A few years removed from the Tinder drama, and in the aftermath of marriage counseling, Leavitt and Conner seem exceptionally close. They post TikToks teasing followers who say they’re in a “lavender marriage.” “We know our marriage, and also if people do have lavender marriages, there’s nothing wrong with that!” Leavitt says. In the car, when Conner explains that he’s used a flip phone for the past year, he’s the first to note that it has nothing to do with the fact that he was previously caught swiping on a dating app while married.

She and Conner occasionally look at plots of land upon which she could make her homesteading dreams come true. “I think I fell more in love with the idea of homesteading than actually homesteading. Like, Oh, it looks so eloquent,” she says. “It is so hard to find land where you can have chickens in a 15-minute radius to a Target. I gotta be close to my Target!” When I check in with her in late April, right before season two is set to air, the pair had just purchased a fixer-upper that will be their forever home, for now. “I thought I wanted Ballerina Farm, but I’m like, you know what? Maybe it’s just so much work. And I’m trying to get into acting right now.”

According to Leavitt, TikTok, the dances, and even the show are secondary to her real passion: acting. “I feel like people don’t like when I talk about acting, people won’t take it seriously. Even my friends or family,” she says, half to me and half to Conner. “And it’s so funny to me, babe, because it was the same thing as social media. I was like, ‘I’m going to make it big on here.’ And friends and family were just like, ‘Okay, best of luck.’ And then I did it.”

She’s auditioned for shows on Hulu and Netflix, as well as the romantic comedy Office Romance with Jennifer Lopez and Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein. (She read for the part of J.Lo’s assistant but didn’t get cast.) She’ll take any job now, but her dream role is fantasy. “Put me in Lord of the Rings. Please let me be one of those elves. I just love fantasy. I love reading it, I love watching it, and I would love to be a part of a project like that.” She watches me closely, like she’s sussing out how seriously I’m going to take her dream. “I don’t know how I’m going to navigate it, but I guess I’d be the first reality star that became a successful actress.”

Conner pauses from tending to Sedona, who just bit her tongue. “Well, and Whitney’s an incredibly talented actress. You really are.” She smiles at her husband. “Wow. Thanks, babe. Come closer to the recorder and say those things.”