Jen Hamilton’s perfect world blew up when the influencer exposed her husband’s unforgivable double life. Then he vanished… but now she could exact a nuclear revenge

Seven million people watched a distraught Jen Hamilton lying in bed, drained and unable to move. They listened as she shared heart-wrenching details about her husband’s betrayal, and her shock that the father of their two young children could be leading a double life.

They encouraged her as she described wallpapering her North Carolina home to cope with the pain and sang a duet with one of her beloved chickens.

Jen, a 35-year-old birthing nurse-turned-influencer, truly spared nothing, telling her followers: ‘Secrets and hiding are what I believe made all this possible, so the way I’m dealing with it is by not having any secrets.’

Brian Hamilton, however, took a different tack. The 39-year-old registered nurse, married to Jen for almost 15 years, signed off on a joint statement which she read to the camera on June 15. Then he vanished from social media.

But for all his attempts to lie low, Brian may soon find himself with nowhere to hide.

Under North Carolina law, Jen could choose the ‘nuclear option’ and haul the woman he has been having an affair with – and by extension, him – into an extremely unwelcome legal spotlight.

The other woman, an unnamed 56-year-old, could be sued by Jen under the so-called ‘homewrecker law’ – allowing a wronged spouse to come after the person who they believe broke up their marriage.

For the privacy-seeking Brian, the prospect of being publicly shamed alongside his new lady love must be mortifying. But for Jen, it might bring sweet revenge.

‘I think she’ll definitely look at it,’ said Charles Ullman, a Raleigh-based family law specialist. ‘It’s not necessarily about the money: it’s that they had a marriage she valued, and someone harmed it. If the jury rules in her favor, it’s validation for the wife that the behavior was egregious.’

Jen, who only signed the separation papers last month, must wait a year until officially filing for divorce and is yet to indicate whether she will pull the trigger for the ‘homewrecker law.’

But she has certainly indicated the depths of her rage.

‘If you don’t want me to talk about this stuff, I don’t know, maybe don’t do it,’ she said in one video. ‘Or don’t do it while you’re married to, like, a super public person who talks about their pubes on the internet.’

And she is savage about the ignorance of the other woman.

‘A direct quote I got was, ‘I knew about you. He talked about you all the time. But I didn’t know you had so many followers,” said Jen.

It’s an explosive end to what seemed on the surface to be a charmed life.

Jen and her sister Julie, now 30, were raised by their parents Lois and Greg to be charitable and active.

Lois worked as a nurse at the local hospital, while Greg ran his own industrial paint contracting business in Asheboro and was a passionate wakeboarder. He won the state championship six times and in 2007 became the US Masters champion.

His two daughters water-skied at 22 months, Greg told his local newspaper, and started wakeboarding at the age of six. Greg in 2008 founded water sports charity Wake The World, to help neglected and handicapped children learn the skills.

From the age of 13, Jen volunteered at a summer camp for children with terminal and chronic illnesses, Victory Junction, held in a small town 12 miles from her childhood home.

She returned year after year, and in 2011 met the man who would become her husband – Brian, from the North Carolina town of Madison, 50 miles from her.

‘He came up to the table where I was eating, and you know like in the cartoons where their eyes go: woah woah woah,’ she explained in a 2017 TikTok, with him grinning awkwardly by her side. ‘That was me. You look at this boy and tell me your teenage eyeballs wouldn’t have gone like that. So, I was crushing hard all summer, and I did what I did best: kept my mouth shut and stayed away from him completely.’

But then the pair found out they went to the same university – Liberty, a private evangelical school in Lynchburg, Virginia. (The Christian school will be forever associated with another scandal – the ignominious resignation in 2020 of its former president, Jerry Falwell Jr, following the exposure of his wife’s extramarital affair with a Miami poolboy. Giancarlo Granda alleged that on occasion Falwell liked ‘to watch’ him with his wife. Falwell, in turn, acknowledged the affair and claimed Granda had tried to extort him).

Jen was studying nursing, while Brian worked for a degree in health and social sciences.

Jen, a virgin until she met Brian, discovered two weeks before graduating that she was having his baby.

And so, in August 2012, a five-months-pregnant Jen walked down the aisle to Brian – with his grandfather, Reverend John Dean Hamilton, officiating.

Their son Ellis, now 13, was followed by Luke, now eight.

The newlyweds bought a small house in Asheboro for $123,000 and embarked on their nursing careers, both initially in the emergency room.

But Jen transitioned swiftly to working in the labor and delivery unit, and during the pandemic her social media posts about life on the wards took off.

Her warm, witty and self-deprecating posts saw her amass a massive following – today she has two million followers on Instagram and five million on TikTok.

In 2021, after seeing a local mother’s post about being depressed and overwhelmed, Jen organized a group of women to turn up at the woman’s house and spend a few hours helping with chores.

That blossomed into the Hot Mess Express, a registered charity offering a free service, staffed by volunteers, with chapters across the country. Any struggling woman can be nominated by a friend, and a team of local volunteer women descend, led by a ‘Chaos Coordinator,’ to help with ‘organizing a single room, working through that overdue laundry, or a whole-house deep clean.’

Her online popularity helped secure a book deal. Birth Vibes was published in May and went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list in the advice and how-to category. It would remain in the top ten for five weeks, thanks to a savvy marketing campaign that saw her criss-cross the country, often with her sister Julie, who works as Jen’s assistant.

Brian, however, did not enjoy the same stellar success.

He initially worked steadily, and in 2020 local media noted how he was employed as a nurse assistant in the pediatric intensive care unit of the hospital, Brenner Children’s, which saved his own life.

At the age of two, Brian spent more than a week in the hospital battling multiple issues including toxic shock syndrome, bilateral pneumonia, bilateral pleural effusion, a staph infection, a strep infection and a fever of 104.

‘It was a lot of prayer that went into me making it, basically,’ he told Fox 8. ‘I believe this was meant to happen and there are kids in the future that I’m meant to pray for, so I’m honored to be a part of that process.’

Yet behind the scenes all was not well.

Jen has said in posts since the separation that Brian stopped working many months ago, to take time for himself.

‘I’d been the only one working for a long time because I wanted to take stress off of him,’ she said. She also claimed that he was uninterested in her.

His Facebook posts show a series of kayaking trips and solo adventures. They also show him questioning reality and feature multiple quotes about living with a neurodivergency.

‘Everything is going great – why does my brain try to tell me differently even when I flip my thoughts to deep gratitude, stillness, awe and a child’s hope,’ he wrote in January. A month later he shared a post about ‘the abusive systems, tactics and deceptions’ that the government and ‘people in power’ use to control humanity, adding: ‘What if a new dawn is right around the corner?’

One meme read: ‘I may be lost, but at least I am also confused.’

Another, in March, lamented that ‘everything feels backwards’; last week, amid the fallout from the separation, he shared a post referencing living in ‘a near constant state of low-grade existential overwhelm since childhood.’

His brief appearances in his now-estranged wife’s posts certainly look uncomfortable. Brian affixes a grin to his face, rigid in his chair, while Jen chats happily to the camera. He last featured on her feeds on June 4, when Jen posted a goofy video showing how terribly she had cut his hair.

Nine days later she posted, then deleted, a video of her crying.

In subsequent days she suggested that Brian had been unfaithful before.

‘I wish to God that I could say I was strong enough to leave at the first situation,’ she said.

She’s also posted about ‘needing to get ahead of something’ and ‘other things’ Brian has done in her marriage, followed by an exchange of emotional texts from him.

‘Losing you is the dumbest thing l’ve ever done,’ Brian wrote. ‘I don’t want to leave you in rubble. I want all of you guys to be in my life.’ She responded, quite savagely, ‘You already have.’

However, Jen has also channeled her grief into something positive, with all profits from her merchandising store throughout July and August going to support women seeking ways out of difficult relationships. So far she has raised $100,000.

Now the couple is faced with the awful task of separating their lives.

In January 2025, they bought their second home together – a $762,000 three-bed, three-bathroom modern farmhouse on the outskirts of Asheboro. Brian will be entitled to half the marital property, and potentially half of the business they built as a couple.

Neither of them makes large sums from nursing – he would earn around $80,000 a year as a registered nurse, while she would make up to $101,000 for her specialization. It is likely that the bulk of their fortune comes from her social media work and her book sales.

Brian’s infidelity, under North Carolina law, automatically disqualifies him from requesting alimony payments from his spouse.

And Jen can, of course, go even further and sue the other woman for damages, to be decided at trial by a jury.

John Vermitsky, a family law specialist based in North Carolina, told the Daily Mail that the law was quite commonly invoked.

He currently has around 20 such cases on his books, and says thousands are being filed across the state – despite legal fees running into the high tens of thousands, and the process often taking 12-18 months.

‘It’s certainly not just wealthy people who file these cases,’ he said. ‘I see wealthy people and poor people, sports stars and mechanics. The motivations vary by the person. Some want to recoup financially; others want the scarlet A letter on the other person’s chest, and to get it all out publicly.

‘Some use it as a bargaining chip – to get better terms on the divorce case, if the other person wants to avoid the publicity.’

But Victoria Gillispie Hardin, founder and owner of Hardin Law Firm, said she often advises wronged spouses against pursuing the claim.

‘The only people who wins in these cases are the lawyers,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘Unless it’s a professional athlete, it’s rarely worth it. In her situation, as a celebrity, she may choose to hire an attorney and make this other woman’s life a living hell.

‘But I would say to her, rather than spending hundreds of thousands on an attorney, go take that trip of a lifetime, get that plastic surgery.’

Charles Ullman, the attorney who said Jen would likely look at the law, said that it could be a way of ruining the other woman – her bank accounts and home could all be taken for collection.

But he also warned that it can be extremely unpleasant for the wronged spouse, noting that ‘the person who had the affair is incentivized to say they’ve had a terrible marriage, and it was not – as the law requires – loving and affectionate.’

The Daily Mail has reached out to both Jen and Brian for comment.

Meanwhile, Gillispie Hardin offered Jen advice that Brian, for one, may hope his ex-wife follows – though her followers would probably rather she did not.

The attorney encouraged Jen to stop posting.

‘Most judges do not like anything being said in public,’ she said. ‘My clients: I advise them to not put things on social media. I say get your girlfriends, go to one of those rooms with a sledgehammer and bust a TV.’