Wait, There Is More MomTok Soft-Swinging Drama?
Season two of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives may still be filming, but fans don’t have to wait for the premiere to watch MomTok drama play out. On Sunday, Kenna Gibbons — who is one of the original members of MomTok but did not appear on the first season of the Hulu show — posted a series of videos unpacking her role in the viral “soft swinging” scandal and breaking her silence about ex-husband Brayden Rowley’s alleged affair with Taylor Frankie Paul.
Let’s rewind, shall we?
In 2022, Mormon MomTok influencer Paul posted a video announcing her divorce from husband Tate Paul (while lip-syncing to Miley Cyrus’s “Malibu,” naturally). Shortly afterward, Taylor Frankie Paul told followers that she, her ex-husband, and their friend group had been involved in a “soft swinging” arrangement and admitted that she’d violated the group’s policies by going “all the way” with someone she also ended up “catching feelings” for. Internet commenters have long speculated that that someone was Rowley, but until now, there was no corroboration, and Rowley wasn’t even named on the show. Rowley has not publicly spoken about Gibbons’s allegations, and the Cut has reached out to him for comment.
In her five-part video series, Gibbons appeared to confirm that speculation and tell her side of the story. Gibbons says she and her ex swung twice with an unnamed “Couple 1 and Couple 2,” who are believed to be Taylor Frankie Paul and Tate Paul and Miranda and Chase McWhorter, respectively. According to Gibbons, the first swinging session took place during a group cabin trip organized by two of the husbands. “We did switch partners and had soft swinging happen,” says Gibbons, who later confronted her husband about her suspicion that something was brewing between him and Taylor Frankie Paul (Rowley denied it, Gibbons says, and assured her he and Paul “didn’t want to go down that route”). But after a “second and final” soft-swinging session at the Pauls’ house a few weeks later, Gibbons’s suspicions persisted, and she says she told her husband she was done swinging altogether. “I remember looking at him and saying, ‘If this is what you want, we can divorce now, because I won’t participate any longer,’” says Gibbons, who claims she also told Paul she was finished with the arrangement.
But, she claims, the affair continued, and the pair considered leaving their spouses. It was then that Gibbons says she decided to end her marriage: “A physical affair, I had worked through,” she says. “That sounds wild but it’s easier to work through than the emotional … to want to leave and disrupt your son’s life like that, I’m done.”
On Wednesday, Paul responded to the drama with a TikTok refuting Gibbons’s versions of events. Paul says the fellow Utah mom “never asked to stop” swinging and was in fact “one of the instigators” of the whole arrangement. “The amount of times SHE wanted to play,” reads the caption to the video, which includes footage of her and Gibbons kissing and a screenshot of a text message from Gibbons that reads, “I’m drunk and I wish I was kissing you.” I guess we’ll see how it all plays out on season two.
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