'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' star says the show glossed over her health struggles: 'My hair was...'
Hulu's reality hit series 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' dropped its second season in May 2025. The show follows the lives of influencer Mikayla Matthews, Taylor Frankie Paul, Whitney Leavitt, and Mayci Neeley, as the original members of MomTok, who were later joined by fellow influencers and cast members Jen Affleck, Demi Engemann, Jessi Ngatikaura, and Layla Taylor. However, in a recent interview, Matthews dropped a bombshell about the show's deliberate omission of a deeply personal chapter of her life.
“The first week of filming Season 1, I had just got my breast implants taken out [out of concern over breast implant illness],” Matthews told Yahoo Style, adding, "I had lost like 12 pounds, my eyebrows were falling out, my hair was falling out." She also spoke about her struggle with chronic eczema on camera, only to find it never made it on the show for viewers to see. She told the outlet, “I had eczema growing up, but it was like a whole ’nother level. I was dealing with a whole bunch of infections and different things. It wasn't something I could hide.”
View this post on Instagram
She added, “I thought I was going to get more in-depth on the show [about] my chronic illness … how it's affected me and my mental health and my family, my relationship. But … the context wasn't there. People were like, ‘Oh, what happened to this girl? Why is she having rashes?’ So they gravitated toward my social media.” Matthews first opened up about her skin condition in May 2023 on a now-deleted video on TikTok, as reported by In Touch.
@madeleine_white I’ve already been to lax and back and no gravy I genuinely have never felt worse
♬ original sound - Sam Jorden
Also on Instagram, Matthews didn't hold back and lifted the curtain on her health condition when she shared a video titled, "Watching my chronic condition absolutely destroying my confidence." She posted, "With my job being mainly in front of a camera, the toll it has taken on my mental health the last year has been very hard to say the least. Its been difficult to show up in relationships and I’m not able to be the best mom I know I am. Being in pain 24/7 and getting 2-4 hours of sleep every night. I’m embarrassed to post this but at the same time feel absolutely empowered to show people they’re not alone ily."
The mother of three kicked off the video with a happy face and smiles all over. She shared with the fans glimpses behind the scenes of her life. In one of the segments, she is also seen crying as she shows off the rashes on her stomach, hands, face, and neck. However, later, Matthews was able to find a solution to her debilitating illness in therapy. She told the outlet, “I always knew everything that was happening to me [externally] was happening internally, but I wasn't thinking as far as trauma. I was thinking it's my gut, it's my liver … but what's stored in your gut is that trauma. And so you kind of have to pick it out one by one.”
“That's what healed me, honestly, is like finally speaking up for myself and working on myself,” she said, adding, “The more I let go, the more I started healing.” In her podcast, 'The Sqeeze,' on May 21, she revealed that she was a victim of sexual abuse at a very young age. Matthews continued, “I’ve felt a lot of anger while unraveling these traumatic events that happened to me in my childhood, some I have yet to open up about. I think under all that anger are the wounds I’ve yet to heal.”
