About Whitney Leavitt:
As a reality TV celebrity, Whitney Leavitt of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” has been involved in numerous conflicts, but one episode sticks out above the others.
The Utah influencer gained notoriety for a highly contentious TikTok post long before viewers questioned whether Leavitt had too much past experience and training to participate on the current season of Dancing With the Stars with professional Mark Ballas.
In 2021, Whitney Leavitt uploaded a video of herself dancing next to her newborn son, who had been hospitalized with Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and pneumonia. She wrote in the now-deleted video: Due to oxygen deprivation, Little Lee (or Liam) was admitted to the hospital. He had a positive RSV test.
“Waiting for him to be able to breathe properly on his own,” she said, dancing around her sleeping infant while Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 hit song “LOVE” played in the background.
The video seemed to have been posted in response to someone asking her, “Sending prayers… but what happened? I’m completely perplexed.
Many people accused Whitney Leavitt of downplaying her son’s illness on X after she posted it.
“If this isn’t a sign that this baby is being neglected for TikTok fame, I don’t know what is,” someone commented at the time.
“What upsets me even more is that when she publicly announces her child is in danger, she doesn’t shed a tear—yet when she makes a video feeling sorry for herself because people misunderstood her, she cries so much,” said another. In a subsequent TikTok, the reality TV personality responded to the criticism and expressed regret for the way the video seemed.
“I understand why people were upset about the video I made,” stated Leavitt. I just want to be clear that I made a sincere effort to maintain my optimism. It’s crucial, in my opinion, to avoid making assumptions about someone’s circumstances.
“I took the video down because I could see how people misunderstood it,” she went on. To be honest, I was only attempting to maintain my composure in a frightening circumstance.
The TikTok controversy was later brought up again in a 2024 episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Whitney Leavitt clarified that she recorded the video because her son was at last beginning to show improvement.
He was terrified for the first few days, but he gradually began to recover. I decided to do something fun, so I created a video,” she said.
People believed that I was taking advantage of my baby’s sickness to get attention or influence. “Even now, every video I post gets criticism,” she continued, alluding to the controversy that initially forced the MomTok group into reality TV.
“Online, Taylor was forgiven so quickly for swinging, and yet, even now, every video I post gets criticism.” While some of her co-stars supported her, others asserted that Whitney Leavitt had told them in private that she wanted to “get likes and influence.”
Even after she moves on to the DWTS semifinals, the video keeps following her. Leavitt admitted to Amanda Hirsch in a June episode of the podcast Not Skinny But Not Fat that she “didn’t even understand what was happening with that video.”
Eventually, her husband Conner advised her to remove it because people were reacting adversely.
She said, “I needed some time before saying anything.” “I detest that this is now a part of my life.”