Photo: Elinor Kry

When I show up at Jen Hamilton’s white farmhouse in Asheboro, North Carolina, on a humid Tuesday morning, there’s a pile of broken-down cardboard boxes in the backyard. Today is her wedding anniversary — but Hamilton, a 35-year-old labor-and-delivery nurse with 5 million followers on TikTok, says she recently found out her husband had been living a “double life.” To mark the occasion, she’s invited over all her nursing co-workers for what she’s calling her “Jendependence” party, which will include a potluck and a bonfire. “I’m gonna burn my bedsheets,” she tells me.

In June, Hamilton posted a video of herself sobbing in front of her garage. “I just want the healed version of myself to come and tell me that it’s going to be okay,” she said through tears. It was a long way from the videos answering questions about inductions, epidurals, and vitamin K shots that first made her go viral five years ago. But it made a certain sense with her reputation as a southern, tell-it-like-it-is girl’s girl who’s as likely to post about not waxing before going to the water park with her kids as she is to call out the hypocrisy of MAGA Christians. When she woke up the next morning, the video of her crying was everywhere with followers posting reaction stitches and theories that her husband was cheating on her. Hamilton quickly took it down and, a few days later, shared a somber statement that she and her husband of 14 years — who have two children together, ages 9 and 13 — were separating. But while many people expected her to take a break from social media, she has been posting through it, often multiple times a day. At first, she appeared grief-stricken, her eyes puffy from crying. But lately, her tone has shifted. “I’m done being people’s PR manager,” she said in a video last month, in which she alleged her husband had been having an affair with a 56-year-old woman. “While I was at the hospital taking care of people, he found the time to have a whole other life,” she said.

This spring, Hamilton felt like she was at the top of her game. Her first book, Birth Vibes: Stories and Strategies for an Empowered Birth, had just hit the New York Times best-seller list when everything around her came crashing down. This would destroy most people. But Hamilton refuses to let a man’s mistakes derail her career. She built her identity online helping other women. Why not air the intimate details of her divorce if they could make someone else feel less alone? Her husband has become an internet villain, and Us Weekly covers every update she posts. “I tell my kids, ‘Nosy people pay our bills,’” she says.

At home, Hamilton is eager to show me the new wallpaper she’s put up — a rich green-and-blue floral print, which she says her husband would hate — and takes me to her chicken coop so I can hold a chick that just hatched yesterday. Then we pile in the car with her sister, Julie, who works as her assistant, to get lunch at Burrito Brothers, a local Mexican restaurant where Hamilton used to meet her husband and kids for dinner after her Saturday nursing shifts. Hamilton grew up in Asheboro. Her dad painted buildings for a living, and her mom was a nurse — “she’s there right now,” Julie says as we drive by the hospital. Hamilton was raised evangelical, and after high school, she enrolled in the nursing program at Liberty University, the country’s most staunchly conservative evangelical college. “That’s what turned me liberal,” she says. In 2011, Hamilton met Brian, a fellow Liberty student, while they were both working at a summer camp for kids with chronic and terminal illnesses. She was a virgin and a “goody two-shoes.” They started dating a few months later. Soon, she was pregnant. “I remember standing in line to get a pregnancy test at Dollar General, and that thing lit up like the Fourth of July,” she says. “I was terrified. I cried and I cried and I cried because this was not the plan.”

At Liberty, students get expelled for having premarital sex. Hamilton found out she was pregnant two weeks before graduation. “I kept my mouth shut,” she says. But when her friends and people from church eventually learned she was pregnant, they iced her out. “They treated me like I had the plague,” she says. Soon, she was 22 and married with a baby and working as an ER nurse. Her second child was born a few years later, and eventually, she switched to working on the labor-and-delivery floor.

Around the time of the pandemic, she got on TikTok. Her early videos were “silly mom stuff” — the polar opposite of the tradwife aesthetic. She had a series called “Homemaking for the Modern Mom,” in which she’d film her strategies to avoid folding laundry and roast her husband for not helping out around the house. Eventually, the algorithm figured out what she did for work and her feed was flooded with stories of birth trauma and medical misinformation. Her patients weren’t going to prenatal classes — they were going to TikTok. She started posting videos about what to expect when it comes to cervical exams, catheters, and group B strep. By 2021, she had over a million followers. Soon, patients started recognizing her at the hospital. “I’d walk into the room and they’d be like, I’ve been watching you this whole time.”