The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives newcomer Miranda McWhorter can barely remember a time before MomTok’s now-infamous “soft-swinging scandal.”
“I feel, like, the first months [and] almost a year of my daughter’s life was, like, kind of a blur,” Miranda, 27, said on the Wednesday, May 14, episode of “The Viall Files” podcast, breaking down in tears. “I just didn’t want that to happen again.”
Miranda shares daughter Cohen, now 4, and son Brooks, now 6, with ex-husband Chase McWhorter.
According to the social media influencer, her postpartum experience with Cohen — including her early milestones — were a blur amid the aftermath of the swinging scandal. (Miranda’s former best friend, now-costar Taylor Frankie Paul, revealed in 2020 that their friend group had all hooked up with each other despite their respective marriages.)
“I was just so disassociated,” Miranda tearfully recalled. “Thinking back now, regarding my kids, that’s the part that is still a little bit of a wound for me ‘cause I don’t feel like I was fully myself and, in turn, I wasn’t fully a present mother.”
“I was, just, so disassociated,” Miranda tearfully recalled. “Thinking back now, regarding my kids, that’s the part that is still a little bit of a wound for me ‘cause I don’t feel like I was fully myself and, in turn, I wasn’t fully a present mother.”
Taylor, 30, dropped the bombshell claims that she and then-husband Tate Paul were intimate with their friends before their divorce. Miranda and Chase, meanwhile, denied the claims before eventually ending their marriage, too.
“It was never, like, conversations that led to this. It was, like, we were already all hanging out, having drinks … or maybe one of the guys would dare me and Taylor to kiss or something like that,” Miranda recalled to podcast host Nick Viall about the swinging boundaries. “From there, is what would lead to other things.”
According to Miranda, there were no “swinging parties” and the most she and Chase ever did was have sex together while another couple did the same in another corner of the room.
“I was very, very firm with the things that maybe other couples had done that I was not interested in doing,” she said. “That’s something I told Taylor, as well. … It was never, like, ‘This is a world [Chase and I were] going to explore. We want to be swingers.’ It was just, kind of, circumstances we got ourselves into, and then things would happen.”
Miranda also stressed that the swinging scandal “had nothing to do” with her and Chase going their separate ways.
“I don’t think that played a role in the slightest, actually,” she said. “I think there were other issues that led to [swinging] being more of an OK thing in our mind at the time. For me, back then, shame was a big part of it.”
Miranda, who said that she was privately dealing with a “faith crisis” about being Mormon, explained that she and Chase also struggled with communicating.
“I feel, like, our communication wasn’t great a lot of the time,” Miranda reflected. “Chase is a very passionate person and a very emotional person. … I think that he has big feelings, and I think that really serves him as far as being a father goes because he is very passionate about our children and very supportive and one of the biggest hype men you’ll ever meet.”
Chase was also supportive of Miranda choosing to appear on season 2 of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
“He was very, like, ‘If you choose to do this, I got you [and] support you,’” she said on Wednesday’s podcast episode. “I think that he’s been supportive [of] me doing it the way that I want to do it. One of our biggest strengths as a coparent relationship is that we do not speak negatively of one another.”
While Miranda was also offered to appear on the Hulu series’ debut season, she declined.
“Through the first season, I tossed the idea back and forth, and ultimately I decided that it wasn’t a good fit. I think there are a lot of reasons for that,” Miranda exclusively told Us Weekly in a May cover story. “I wasn’t quite going through a divorce at the time of the decision-making process, but had I decided to, my divorce would’ve been on [the show], and I think that would’ve been very difficult. Reality TV isn’t always great for relationships.”
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season 2 premieres Thursday, May 15, on Hulu.
