‘Controversial Adult-Child Relationship in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’

Despite her fresh-faced looks and warm smile, Demi Engemann is rapidly emerging as the stand-out baddie of hit reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

Set in the American state of Utah, the series has gained a cult following thanks to the sex-fuelled antics of Ms Engemann and a gaggle of glamorous, TikTok-addicted ‘momfluencers’.

Utah, dominated by the powerful Mormon church – which bans alcohol, coffee and sex before marriage – is famously conservative. Yet the well-heeled women at the heart of the on-screen drama show few such inhibitions.

Adultery is an ever-present fear for the Mormon Wives, clandestine Tinder exchanges are par for the course and one recent storyline was based on selling sex toys.

Much, too, has been made of ‘soft swinging’, a form of wife-swapping in which young Mormons take sexual partners from among married friends (with certain strict conditions).

Mormon Wives has been great business for Disney Channel, which broadcasts the show in Britain.

Yet its addictive diet of vast properties, revealing party frocks and petty feuds has been surpassed in recent weeks by an earthier and altogether more compelling talking point – as it dawns on viewers that Demi Engemann first met her handsome American football-star husband when he was aged 26 and married. And she was a child of ten.

The reaction has been unforgiving with viewers condemning the couple’s relationship and their yawning 16-year age gap.

One post on X described the history between the pair as ‘so disturbing’. Another remarked: ‘Was this information necessary? Now I’m sick.’

One Reddit subscriber posted that, ‘My husband and I have a similar age gap, and both agree it would have been weird and wildly inappropriate had he known me when I was a child.’

A fellow poster said: ‘To have met your wife as a young child while you were an adult yourself just feels gross to me.’

The story begins more than two decades ago in Provo, Utah, a 115,000-strong community located 43 miles south of Salt Lake City and, like its better-known neighbour, closely associated with the Mormon religion or, to use its full title, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The most famous devotees, 1970s pop superstars The Osmonds, have close ties with Provo.

It is also home to the church-run Brigham Young University, whose football team in the early 2000s featured a star quarterback called Bret Engemann.

Describing the Engemann family as Provo royalty would hardly be an exaggeration.

Now in his mid-nineties, Bret’s father Karl was a senior music industry executive who worked with performers such as The Beach Boys, Bobbie Gentry, Grand Funk Railroad and, perhaps inevitably, the Osmonds.

Bret’s older brother Paul was a singer who worked with celebrated record producer Giorgio Moroder.

Paul’s recording credits included the theme tune for the hit gangster movie Scarface – starring Al Pacino – and the official song for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Another sibling, a sister called Shawn, was married to chat-show host Larry King.

Years later, the Mormon Wives star – who was born Demi Lucy May – would admit that her future in-laws were the ‘talk of the town’ when she was growing up. So, it was perhaps unsurprising that she soon became aware of the footballing hero with the pin-up looks.

Speaking in a 2023 TikTok video that has only recently come to light, Demi said of Bret that she ‘knew him through a family friend growing up’.

She continued: ‘So, when I was nine years old, he was married for the first time and having babies.

‘I honestly don’t think we ever met or crossed paths, which is so insane because the family friend that I knew him through was one of my best friends growing up. And I was over there all the time and he was over there all the time, but we always somehow missed each other.

‘Or maybe we just didn’t realise because of the age gap and he just wasn’t worried about a little nine-year-old running around. Needless to say, I was very aware of his existence. I thought he just was so cute…’

It seems that it wasn’t much longer before they did encounter each other in person, as she disclosed in a cryptic social media post last summer.

Using the hashtag #agegaprelationship, the couple are pictured under a caption that reads:

‘Thinking about the “you meet people twice theory” and how I was 10 and he was 26 when we first met.’

Little is known about the years that followed, but it is clear that something – whether they were aware of it or not – had clicked. 

When she was 18, Demi noticed that Bret had started following her on Instagram and was – she later admitted – ‘just kind of like starstruck because I always had a little crush on him’. 

First, however, she married a man named Blake Corbin and together they had a daughter called Maude, now aged seven.

Meanwhile, Bret had two sons with his first wife before embarking on a short-lived second marriage. 

Then fate stepped in. After all this time, Demi and Bret reconnected – when Blake and Bret, current and future husband, struck up a friendship at the gym they both used. 

Soon, following a battle with postnatal depression, her own marriage would come to an end. 

And after a whirlwind romance, she finally tied the knot with her American football-star one year later.

Now in its second season, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has shown Mormonism in a whole new light.

Its more bizarre tenets include the belief that Jesus Christ visited the Native Americans.

While Mormonism allowed polygamy in the early decades, it is now strictly prohibited. Members of the church are expected to abstain from sex before and outside marriage.

Speaking about the rash of negative comments aimed at Demi, leading psychologist Linda Papadopoulos suggested the widespread distaste inevitable.

We are ‘evolutionally inclined’ to see relationships involving people of widely different ages as dysfunctional, she told the Mail.

‘So, if there a very big age gap – the idea that you were starting up your first business when your partner was in nappies – that is an aversion to most people.

‘People feel uncomfortable even if there isn’t any impropriety there.’

‘There’s this fear that even if grooming didn’t occur, it is an imbalance of this power – and a lot of people are then thinking “this shaped her choice later – was she really free to choose?”

Demi, meanwhile, has other battles to fight.

She has been under a cloud of on-screen suspicion over whether she was unfaithful during a Mormon Wives trip to the Italian set of a rival reality show, for example.

For the record, Demi has insisted that ‘nothing happened’ with Vanderpump Villa star Marciano Brunette and said ‘there wasn’t even a remote attraction to him’.

Hints of off-screen feuding between the stars were circulating even before the series appeared on television screens.

And claims, however unfounded, that Demi tried to boost her own pay deal by having Jessi Ngatikaura – supposedly her best friend – kicked off the show did her reputation few favours.

Even when her supposed misbehaviour is a distant memory, however, it is the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the Engemann menage – and a friendship that began when her husband was married and she was ten – that are set to linger in the memory for some considerable time.