'Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' Featured an All-Time Reality Show Cruelty

I’ve already recounted the awful, never-ending middle-school behavior of the women on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, but one moment deserves to be singled out for its sheer cruelty toward a cast member.

Late in the season, the Mormon wives take a girls’ trip, undoubtedly engineered by producers to stir up as much tension and drama as possible among women who clearly don’t like each other. During the trip, Layla Taylor — the youngest cast member and someone who avoids conflict like the plague — suggested they play a game she’d seen on TikTok: Everyone would take a pregnancy test, toss it in a basket, and they’d check the results anonymously.

With eight or nine women in the group, the odds of someone being pregnant are pretty high — not just statistically, but given the nature of their lives. Across two seasons, there have already been multiple pregnancies, some expected, some not. Even though the show rarely features their children and these MomTok women almost never talk about parenting, pregnancy is basically a running theme. Layla, whose period was a few days late, partly suggested the “game” because she thought she might be pregnant herself. That her relationship was new-ish and unstable didn’t seem to faze her — again, par for the course in this universe.

So they all took the tests, dropped them in the basket, and sure enough, two came back positive. The results weren’t immediately claimed, though Mikayla and Mayci both knew they were the ones who were pregnant. Mayci, in particular, had no intention of sharing the news—it was early, it involved IVF, and she didn’t trust the group with such sensitive information.

Here’s where the real cruelty comes in: Demi—otherwise the season’s villain—had been struggling with infertility for years. She and her husband had been trying to have another child with no luck, and every pregnancy test was a trigger. Understandably so.

So when two tests came back positive and no one spoke up, Demi allowed herself a fleeting moment of hope. Maybe one of them was hers. She took another test and—of course—wasn’t pregnant.

That alone would’ve been hard. But it got worse when Mikayla and Mayci eventually confessed that the tests belonged to them. Though they tried to tamp down their excitement, Demi was still left to grieve her dashed hopes while publicly congratulating the others. She sobbed for an hour, and unlike most of the show’s dramatic moments, this one felt real. The kind of sobbing that comes from deep in the gut, where actual grief lives. It was also the only moment in two seasons where Demi genuinely deserved sympathy.

It was brutal to watch. And while Layla was ostensibly to blame, it’s hard to believe there wasn’t at least one producer who knew exactly how this would play out and pushed Layla to go through with it anyway. She looked like someone doing it more out of obligation than enthusiasm. It was an absolutely appalling, gut-wrenching moment of cruelty.