For years, Vicky Hernandez and Niya Esperanza were regular fixtures on each other’s TikToks, showing off their travels, Costco runs and shopping hauls, often alongside Hernandez’s youth pastor husband, Joel Mitchell. Then, sometime in 2025, the videos stopped.

Hernandez returned online last month to explain her absence, alleging that her husband had an affair with one of her closest friends and saying she’d been preoccupied with the fallout. But interviews with more than half a dozen former members of Trinity United Presbyterian Church, court records and internal church emails reveal a more complicated reality.

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