The Secret Lives Of The Nannies & Assistants Of Mormon Wives

Jalen Bradford starts his job as Jessi Draper’s assistant in the afternoon. He organizes her closet, handles her PR packages, and processes her returns. “There’s normally a list of notes that I go off of,” he says. “And it’s just like daily tasks that she needs around the house.”

“It’s a lot to do with her closet,” Jalen explains, “and like just like buying groceries and makeup items and stuff. There’s other days that I do content filming with her. I do some of her TikToks when she has bigger projects or collaborations.”

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star isn’t always in her Utah home when Jalen is working. She’s often filming the Hulu show, traveling, or working for her hair extensions and salon empire, JZ Styles. But there are often other members of her team around.

“There is a pretty big team,” Jalen says. “I honestly don’t even know the full extent of it. There’s me and a nanny who help Jessi out in the house. Then she has her own assistants and stuff for her salon and for the show.”

Jalen documents his experience working for Jessi on TikTok and the reality TV star doesn’t shy away from letting it be known that she has an assistant. “How she presents and everything is exactly how she is online, which is really cool. She’s really authentic in that way,” Jalen says. But he does put his own boundaries in place.

“I’m really cautious about what brands are sending her PR and just like personal space,” Jalen says. “I won’t film her room or her bathroom. I just think if it would make me uncomfortable for people to see it, I don’t post it.”

Jessi is one of the nine (or fewer, depending on group dynamics at any given moment) main cast members of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Hulu’s hit reality TV series that entered its fourth season on March 12. The women’s common thread, and the inspiration for the show’s title, is that they were raised in or near The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and steered into marriages and motherhood at a young age. However, that is a mere backdrop for their fame.

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On TikTok, they formed a #MomTok squad known for doing coordinated dance routines in matching sweat sets with their long hair in “Utah curls” (a term Jessi trademarked). The show catapulted them to a more mainstream fame, bringing bigger brand deals, girls’ trips, busier schedules, and more time outside the home. Yet their label as “wives” remained embedded in their brands, regardless of their marital status (several of the women are divorced and single). But though their public personas are defined by their relationship to domesticity, the show spends very little time showing viewers what it takes to be a working mother and “wife.” On social media, though, some of the nannies and assistants who work with the cast do.

Mikayla Matthews, who welcomed her fourth child between seasons three and four, was a stay-at-home mom before she was cast on the show. Though her husband, Jace Terry, lost his job and became a stay-at-home dad after season one premiered, she still needed more hands on deck and hired her older sister, Janelle Matthews, as her part-time assistant.

“She was going through all of her health issues,” Janelle explains. Mikayla suffers from chronic eczema and gets severe flare ups if she doesn’t follow a strict diet. “She is a full-time mom, she does the show and everything. She didn’t want to have to cook all the time.”

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“I’ve always been, not like a nanny, but just kind of like someone who she can call and be like, ‘Hey, are you free to watch the kids right now?'” Janelle says, adding that they formalized that arrangement into a part-time position. Janelle estimates that she works for Mikayla about 20 hours a week which she does outside of her full-time job.

Janelle’s job mainly consists of making meals, doing grocery runs, and cleaning Mikayla’s house, but she does occassionally watch her nieces and nephews. In TikTok videos of Janelle’s day to day life, Mikayla is often present when she’s not filming the show or doing press. As is Jace who started appearing on the show more frequently in season three, participating in a #DadTok group that largely spearheaded by Jessi’s husband, Jordan Ngatikaura, and includes other husbands of the cast.

Mikayla doesn’t have a nanny in a formal sense but several other cast members do. Sadie Summers relocated to Los Angeles to be Jen Affleck‘s live-in nanny while she was a contestant on Dancing With The Stars. She documented her travel day on TikTok, showing herself pushing a twin stroller with Jen’s older kids while Jen pushed her youngest in a pram.

Jen’s husband, Zac, who put a pause on medical school after the show’s season one success, did not appear in the video but did join his family in LA later. As a member of #DadTok, he became increasingly active on social media after emerging from season one to a wave of backlash over his treatment of Jen during a cast trip to Las Vegas, including a heated argument after Jen considered attending a Chippendales show with the other women. His social media posts now consist of pranks with the other husbands from the show, parenting content, and the occasional ode to Jen.

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Whitney Leavitt appears to employ multiple nannies, trading off between them depending on her family’s needs. Her younger sister, Lexi Ellis, joined her and husband Conner Leavitt in Los Angeles to help take care of her three kids while she was on Dancing With The Stars. While there, she posted a series of TikTok videos with Olivia Leavitt, a nanny who also works for the family from time to time.

Mayci Neeley’s assistant, Halle Goodrich, actively documents her time working for the mom of three on TikTok. Taylor Frankie Paul confirmed on Call Her Daddy that a nanny will help out with her three kids while she films her season of The Bachelorette.

Just as it is for any big stay-at-home mom influencer, for Whitney, Mikayla, Jen, Jessi, Taylor, Mayci and fellow cast mates Layla Taylor, Mikayla McWhorter, and Demi Engemann, fame and success brings an inherent contradiction. When broadcasting life as a mom becomes a lucrative career filled with new opportunities, the “mom” portion of these women’s lives requires additional support, whether they post about it or not.

Sometimes this contradiction is a delicate balance. After the Leavitts relocated to New York for Whitney’s Broadway run as Roxie Hart in Chicago, Whitney was accused of putting her career before her kids, including by The Viall Files host Nick Viall and his wife and co-host, Natalie Joy in a December podcast episode. “How is she managing prioritizing being a mom?” Joy asked. Joy and Viall deservedly faced backlash over the comments which included no mention of Whitney’s husband, Conner, and his responsibilities to their children.

#MomTok has always had a tangental relationship to actual motherhood. Reality TV show producers and influencers alike know that the realities of parenting don’t make for particularly engaging content. However, when wife and mom is the foundation of these women’s brands, they seem almost set up for the kind of criticism Joy and Viall expressed. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives cast and other women in the tradwife sphere like Estee Williams and Hannah Neeleman, a.k.a. Ballerina Farm, made careers out of homemaker aesthetics and traditional marriage. With that, they became working moms and career women, and someone needs to watch the kids and organize the house while the TikToks are being filmed.

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