The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Conner Leavitt broke his silence after some Dancing With the Stars fans expressed frustration with his casting.
“Hi, I’m Whitney’s husband. text ‘Conner L’ to 21523 😜,” Conner, 32, who has been married to DWTS season 34 contestant Whitney Leavitt since 2016, captioned a TikTok post on Monday, September 7.
The social media video showed Conner and his DWTS pro partner, Adele Zaikman, pretending to read comments about him on his phone before becoming visibly upset by what they saw online.
“POV: You get cast on DWTS and find out ‘nepo husband’ doesn’t count as ‘star,’” Conner wrote in the video.
Whitney, 33, addressed the backlash as well in her own TikTok video, which read, “When someone says our nepo daddy isn’t a star.” Conner replied to the show of support, writing, “Yall are the reason I Nepo so hard 🤘🔥🖤 love you guys so much 🖤🥹.”
Reality TV fans were introduced to the couple when The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives premiered in September 2024. During the season 1 premiere, Conner and Whitney relocated from Hawaii to Utah, which they had previously left after he admitted to having a secret Tinder account to solicit NSFW images.
Conner and Whitney, who shared two kids at the time, worked on their marriage and later expanded their family with a third baby.
“It takes time, and it takes a lot of work. I remember being in therapy, and my therapist asked me, ‘Before we even dive into this, you need to decide is this something you want to work out or something you don’t want to work out?’” Whitney exclusively told Us in September 2024. “It was something I really had to sit down [and think], ‘Did I want to rebuild this trust?’ That doesn’t mean that things aren’t still triggering to me. When it is, then I’m going to work it out and just keep moving forward.”
After viewers started to speculate about Conner’s sexuality, the pair poked fun at the comments.
“Do I need to put out a sex tape or something? Trust me, we’re good. Like, everything is fine,” Whitney quipped on the “Off the Vine” podcast in October 2024. “I think it’s because, like, when we were going through our personal stuff — and I know you haven’t seen it, but he struggled through a porn addiction — and there’s a scene where one of my friends says something along the lines like, ‘Oh, I can see how he was confused sexually.’”
Conner, for his part, opened up about working through trauma after he was sexually abused as a child.
“I had a really big problem with pornography. On top of that, I had a presence on a dating website — not because I didn’t love my wife but because I felt like I needed validation,” he explained during the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season 2 reunion in June 2025. “I needed to get help. So we started going to therapy and trying to figure out why — and I knew why.”
Conner revealed that he only shared his history “with Whitney, my therapist and my family” before addressing it on screen.
“When I was a little boy, I was raped. When I was finally honest with that emotion and that memory, everything made sense,” he said in the emotional joint interview with Whitney. “The validation I needed … I hate that I did that to you. But I’m so proud that I was able to be honest with you and start working through some really, really hard stuff.”
Dancing With the Stars premieres on ABC and Disney+ Tuesday, September 15, at 8 p.m. ET.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
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