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, 35, 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. In TikToks that have racked up millions of views and on Substack, Hernandez tried to show the other side of a story that had previously made waves only within a prominent Presbyterian church in Southern California.
“There was wrongdoing. There was betrayal. There were consequences,” Hernandez wrote in an Aug. 26 Substack post titled “Your Husband is a Groomer, Leave.” “And that is the story I’m actually trying to tell.”
