The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Mikayla Matthews claims she was sexually abused by multiple individuals when she was a child.
“I feel like it’s hard … to pinpoint an age of where it all started because I did open up [during season 2 of Mormon Wives] about being sexually abused, and that happened before we moved to Utah,” Matthews, 25, said on the Wednesday, May 21, episode of “The Squeeze” podcast. “I don’t know what age I was, anywhere from, I’m guessing 6, 7 [or] 8.”
Matthews and her six siblings were raised in California until their parents divorced and her now-estranged mother moved them to Utah. (The reality TV star has not publicly shared who allegedly assaulted her in her early childhood.)
According to Matthews, another incident occurred after she moved to Utah with an unidentified man she claimed was “definitely touchy with [her].”
“Now thinking back, I was already being sexually abused before, and so I didn’t quite get it,” she recalled. “I was still pretty young. I think when I was probably 11 or 12, I started to notice a little bit more that it wasn’t OK, but I still hadn’t told anybody about it.”
According to Matthews, “a lot of” the abuse occurred when her mom would go to work.
“She worked late and early, so she would go to the back room and take a nap or whatever,” Matthews claimed. “And I would be left alone with [this man] … or we would come over to ride his four-wheelers and he’d be like, ‘If you want to ride the four-wheeler, you have to do this first for me.’ She never saw any of that, and I never told her.”
Matthews first spoke to her siblings about the alleged abuse in 2015 when she was 15 years old shortly before she left home.
“I moved out down to my friend’s house and my [older] sister moved out with me,” Matthews recalled. “I feel like that’s another time period in my life that I blocked out a lot of it. It was, like, another part of my brain shut off.”
Matthews only started to understand the nature of what she called her “sexual trauma” when she started seeing a therapist during filming for Mormon Wives season 2.
“I went to a sexual trauma therapist who was telling me about the shame you get growing up around sex, in general,” she explained to podcast host Tay Lautner. “I think it’s very common in a lot of households, but also in Mormon culture. You don’t talk about sex.”
According to Matthews, the shame of hiding the alleged abuse also “carried over into [her] marriage.” (Matthews married husband Jace Terry when they were 16 and 21, respectively, after she got pregnant with their first child. They are now expecting baby No. 4.)
“That’s been one of the hardest parts of our marriage ‘cause you don’t realize it’s happening,” she said. “You’re so young, you’re not processing it, and then you are raised up with … [this] circumstance of ‘This isn’t for me. It’s for somebody else’s pleasure.’”
Matthews ultimately distanced herself from her mom after she got pregnant at age 16.
“I see her here and there, [but] she moved further away,” Matthews said on the podcast. “After my grandpa passed away, she still comes to take care of my grandma every two weeks, but we don’t really see her unless it’s for holidays or we have a birthday. That’s not a conversation we’ve ever had. … I don’t think I’m ever going to have that conversation and, I think, I’m OK with that now.”
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
