Jessi Draper is ready to shed some light on what really led up to her divorce from Jordan Ngatikaura. The former couple’s volatile relationship has been very well-documented on the past couple of seasons of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, but the cameras did not capture how bad their fights got behind closed doors. Now, Jessi is opening up about Jordan’s go-to tactic in controlling her, claiming that he would “blackmail” her by threatening to post evidence of her affair before it was public knowledge.
During her March 25 appearance on Call Her Daddy, Jessi revealed that it was difficult to leave Jordan after he learned that she kissed Marciano Brunette while filming Vanderpump Villa in early 2025.
“It got to a point where he was blackmailing me with Marciano’s texts, and he had them on a draft on his phone, on TikTok. And anytime he was mad he was like, ‘I’m gonna post them. I’m gonna ruin your life,’” Jessi said. “At the point, no one knew about what I had done. And I was like, ‘You’re gonna ruin my life.’”
She said that when she was trying to prevent Jordan from posting the texts, he made a hurtful comparison to her castmate Taylor Frankie Paul, who pleaded guilty to attacking her partner Dakota Mortensen in 2023. “I’m like kind of chasing him trying to get [his phone],” Jessi said. “He pulls out his phone, starts recording me, and he’s like, ‘What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? Are you gonna be like Taylor? Should I call the cops?’”
That remark was when Jessi realized she was stuck in an incredibly unhealthy dynamic. “He’s baiting me, and he’s 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,’” Jessi said. “I literally left him the next day. I was like, this can’t happen anymore.”
Though the couple briefly reconciled, Jordan filed for divorce on March 19. Jessi said it was a mutual decision, but was “blindsided” that he filed without telling her (despite an “agreement to do it together”) in order to get a TMZ headline. Before ending their marriage, they tried couples therapy, but Jessi said she simply could not forget about how Jordan threatened to ruin her life.
“Having your partner blackmail you in that way, it was something I could never get over,” she continued. “Even after we got back together and went through therapy, like the person that you love the most and should care about you the most, even though you hurt them, should never put you in a situation where you feel like you’re walking on eggshells and you never know if your life’s about to be ruined, because they have that power over you. So that was honestly something that really ruined us. And yeah, it was traumatizing.”
