third season

Escorts. Surveillance. Blackmail. Sex parties?

Jessi Draper of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” is accusing her estranged second husband, Jordan Ngatikaura, of being involved in pretty much all of the above.

Ngatikaura filed for divorce Thursday in Utah after five years of marriage to Draper. Though that was far from the start of their marital problems, she told Alex Cooper during Wednesday’s episode of “Call Her Daddy” — which was taped Friday — that the dissolution filing was something they had agreed to do together. Then he changed his mind, she said, and she got the news via TMZ.

“I’m the one who ended it. I told him on Friday the 13th, so not that long ago, and I just said I want a divorce. He definitely didn’t want it. And now he’s the one rushing to do it, which is a little strange,” Draper told Cooper.

Also strange, in her view, was his choice to state on the documents that she had had an affair, though they had agreed previously that the reason would be the tried-and-true and totally non-gossipy “irreconcilable differences.” Plus Draper had only kissed another man twice, she said. She never had a physical affair with Marciano Brunette of “Vanderpump Villa,” though their emotional affair was a big part of the third season of “Mormon Wives.” Also, Utah is a no-fault state when it comes to divorce.

The Times was unable to contact Ngatikaura on Wednesday for comment on Draper’s allegations.

During the chat, Draper called her estranged husband “calculated” and “emotionally abusive” and said he told her he had been advised by someone to file on his own. She also admitted to Cooper that their marriage most likely was what it was because she went too quickly from divorcing her first husband to starting a relationship with her second.

That said, Draper said that right before Season 1 of “Mormon Wives” dropped on Hulu in September 2024, she was given “proof” that Ngatikaura had been using an escort service in Texas. At the time, she presented her evidence to him, she said, only to have him say it had probably been generated by AI.

Draper also said she had heard rumors of “sex parties” that he allegedly attended, though her sourcing on that allegation was definitely of the friend-of-a-friend-who-was-there variety. She further claimed that Ngatikaura had listened in on her personal conversations via cameras in her house — cameras she said he unplugged when he moved back into the house and she moved to a hotel — and had blackmailed her, threatening to post texts between her and Brunette online.

“Any time he was mad at me, he’s like, ‘I’m going to post them. I’m going to ruin your life,’” Draper told Cooper.

One day, she said, Ngatikaura told her he believed in traditional gender roles and that he should be in his masculine and she in her feminine, and therefore she should do Pilates every day. That led to a fight, during which he threatened to post the texts he had been keeping in a draft in his phone. Nobody knew yet what had happened between her and Brunette, and she worried that exposing everything would hurt her business, where she employs dozens of people.

“I went to go grab his phone. I was like, ‘Jordan, no … This could ruin everything.’ And he goes, ‘OK.’ And I’m freaking out. So, I’m trying to get his phone. I’m kind of chasing him, trying to get it. He pulls out his phone, starts recording me, and he’s like, ‘What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Are you going to be like, “Taylor, should I call the cops?”’ (referring to her embattled co-star and best friend, Taylor Frankie Paul, whose season of “The Bachelorette” was nixed before it aired).

“I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ‘cause he’s friends with Dakota [Mortenson, Paul’s on-and-off boyfriend], so he’s like hearing things like that, obviously, and he’s baiting me and he’s trying to be like, ‘Oh, oh, what are you doing?’ And that was the moment where, for me, I was like, ‘What am I doing? I am chasing around my husband trying to get his phone so he doesn’t blackmail me. This is not healthy.’ And I literally left him the next day,” she said.

“I was like, this can’t happen anymore.”