Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 26, 2026
If you thought The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives couldn’t get messier and more toxic in the wake of the Taylor Frankie Paul situation, let me introduce you to one of the other mothers of Momtok, Jessi Draper. On Wednesday’s episode of Call Her Daddy, Jessi sat down with Alex Cooper and spent the better part of an hour methodically dismantling any remaining goodwill her estranged, clouth-chasing husband Jordan Ngatikaura might have hoped to coast on through their divorce.
The proximate cause is the split itself, which Jessi says she initiated — only to find out via a TMZ text that Jordan had already filed, apparently because he wanted the headline first. They had, she claims, agreed to tell their children together before doing anything official. Jordan did not wait. He also listed Marciano Brunette — the Vanderpump Villa star Jessi kissed during a rough patch in their marriage, a storyline that played out in full on Season 3 of the show — as the official grounds for divorce. Jessi’s reaction to that particular detail was basically: We worked through that, it aired on television, everyone knows I didn’t sleep with him, and you want to put it in the legal filing?.
The blackmail allegation is where things get genuinely ugly. According to Jessi, Jordan kept her texts with Marciano saved as a TikTok draft and threatened to weaponize whenever he was angry — threatening to post them and ruin her life and her business. She describes physically chasing him around the house trying to get his phone, at which point Jordan allegedly started recording her and invoked the specter of Taylor Frankie Paul’s assault arrest, asking whether he should call the cops. JFC. It is not a flattering portrait of a marriage.
Jessi also arrived with counter-allegations. She claims an escort service reached out to her during Season 1 with screenshots proving Jordan had solicited them during a work trip to Texas — before any of the Marciano business, before the show, before any of it. Jordan, she says, denied it and suggested the screenshots were AI-generated. She also says she’s heard, through a chain of sources she acknowledges is a few degrees removed, that Jordan was paying to attend orgies as recently as just after their daughter Jovi was born in 2023. She notes, with some understatement, that she has not directly asked him about that one. (Wait? Jovi? Their daughter’s name is Jovi? Is that short of Jehovah? Or Bon Jovi?)
Jordan, for his part, attempted to include a gag clause in the divorce agreement that would have prevented Jessi from discussing him on any podcast. She didn’t sign it. He also sought a restraining order against her, which was denied on Tuesday. Neither of his legal maneuvers landed, and she is now on record, at length, on one of the most popular podcasts in the country.
The chaos of Mormon Wives this season has already put the show’s future in serious question. Losing Jessi — or having her consumed by a prolonged, televised divorce war — is yet another variable Hulu is going to have to navigate, though during the podcast, Jessi insisted that Hulu has been nothing but gracious, offering to stop filming to protect the Mormon Wives. Ahem. If the fifth season ever sees the light of day, it will be the blowtorch that finally lays to rest the series.
In the meantime, Jen Affleck — poor, boring Jen Affleck — is headed to Los Angeles, where she is apparently going to lead a Mormon Housewives spin-off with nine new cast members. That puts her disdain for Whitney Leavitt into a whole new light — is it possible that Whitney, who had also talked about moving to Los Angeles — pulled out of the potential spin-off by deciding to go play Roxie in Chicago on Broadway? No wonder Jen didn’t congratulate her. Without Whitney, no one is going to watch that spin-off.
