Whitney Leavitt may not have been the Dancing with the Stars Mirrorball champion, but she won the jackpot when she was cast in Chicago on Broadway.
Whitney Leavitt, a 32-year-old influencer from Utah, first found fame through her presence in the TikTok clique “MomTok” before going viral for her role on the reality TV show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Since then, Leavitt has faced a great deal of backlash as a result of her internet fame, but landing the role of Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway might mean she is turning a corner.
Leavitt’s career as an internet influencer started around 2021 when “MomTok” began to grow in popularity. Together with a group of other Utah-based Mormon women, Leavitt made fun and relatable videos about motherhood. Soon, “MomTok” expanded into a TV series called The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a confessional-style reality program that followed the lives of a few of the women involved in “MomTok.”
On The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Leavitt quickly became the villain. While the cast of the show says that all of the storylines that appear on Secret Lives are authentic, Leavitt has been the first to say that the show has many scripted elements.
On Kate Mackz’s podcast, Post Run High, Leavitt talked about the ways in which storylines are created for the show, saying that even though no one told her she was supposed to be the villain on the first season of Secret Lives, she could feel it happening.
“Once we started filming the sixth episode, I kind of thought, ‘Okay, I think I’m the bad guy.’ Just with how people were treating me,” Leavitt said. While she was having conversations with other co-stars off camera to apologize and own up to certain actions and behaviours, these sincere interactions were not being shown on the screen. Leavitt’s believes that this was a purposeful choice to frame her as the villain of the show, a role she doesn’t think she deserved.
This narrative has continued throughout all three seasons of the show, causing Leavitt to receive a great deal of hate online. This hate followed Leavitt onto Dancing with the Stars, where it grew exponentially.
Recently, Leavitt went on Alex Cooper’s podcast Call Her Daddy, with her Dancing with the Stars partner, Mark Ballas, to talk about the discourse that eventually resulted in her being voted off the show right before the finale.
“I felt like this was our last dance,” Leavitt said when asked about the night of her shocking elimination. Although she had received some of the highest scores all season long and was clearly a frontrunner for the Mirrorball trophy, Leavitt knew that with all of the hate she had been receiving online, there was little hope that she would make it into the final five. While the negativity had been bad for quite a while, she believes that the release of the third season of Secret Lives not even a week earlier was the final push for her elimination.
“I mean, I was very clear about why I came back [to Secret Lives] that season,” Leavitt said, referring to the fact that she only came back for a third season because there was a chance she could be cast on Dancing with the Stars. “I was very honest, very clear. Like, I wasn’t trying to mislead anyone or be sneaky about anything. Like, I was very clear about my intentions coming back.”
Fans of the show felt that Leavitt wasn’t there for the “sisterhood” of “MomTok” but was instead exploiting the other women in an attempt to make money. While she admits that Secret Lives had become a business venture for her, she was not the only one who saw it that way.
“I would hope that we were all wanting more from being so vulnerable and sharing our lives with the world,” Leavitt said. “Yes, it may have started a one thing, but I don’t know any reality show that doesn’t transform in some capacity […] Like there are so many things happening for all of the women [on Secret Lives] and I would hope that for all of us that we could use this experience to then venture out to other things that we were wanting.”
While Leavitt has already filmed season four of Secret Lives, it is unclear whether she will return in any capacity after that, especially after the announcement that she has been cast as Roxie Hart in Broadway’s Chicago.
Still, the hate continues for Leavitt as she tries to break free from the narrative set for her in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Perhaps she will find reprieve outside the world of dirty sodas and “MomTok” videos.