About a year ago, TikToker Shelby Lynn made a single video about her husband’s toxic family — and little did she know that it would blow up. The video had a ripple effect in the family, and in a recent update to her video, she shared that things with her in-laws have only gotten worse.
Shelby recently re-shared the fateful video onto TikTok, where she perfectly nailed why the relationship between her and her in-laws was so fraught.
“I found the toxic mother-in-law side of TikTok and that’s where I belong,” she said in a copy of the video she republished on September 20, 2021. Then she played the “put a finger down” game where she told stories about her MIL and put a finger down for everything that was true.
“Put a finger down if you sent your mother-in-law a nice message on Mother’s Day saying that you hope she had a great day and then she took it really offensively, so she had your father-in-law call your parents and yell at them and say that they need to control their daughter better,” she said in the clip.
Then her father-in-law called her “repeatedly” while Shelby was trying to work on her PhD defense.
“And then he wouldn’t stop calling, so he sent you a 500-word text message saying shame on you multiple times and then your MIL sent a really nice email to your husband saying he was being brainwashed and manipulated by way of an unhealthy relationship with his wife,” she added.
Yeah, pretty rough stuff.
Understandably, the video blew up.
More than 1 million people watched Shelby expose her in-law’s crazy Mother’s Day behavior. A year later, the attention the video brought to her in-laws has made things so much worse.
In a more recent video from September 20, Shelby gave an update and revealed that someone told her in-laws about the original video — and they immediately struck back.
Instead of reaching out to Shelby or her husband, they went to Shelby’s employer and the police “trying to get me reprimanded for sharing my story,” she wrote in the video’s caption. “After discovering what they did my in-laws threatened to sue my husband and I for speaking out.”
For the next year, Shelby’s in-laws tried to “silence” her by “going after" her career.
“Additionally, my in-laws made multiple accounts on three different social media platforms to try and recruit people to go after my ex and I,” she wrote in the clip.
All her MIL wanted was to prove that Shelby didn’t love her son “and married him just to ‘take him away’ and destroy their family.”
It wasn’t just her MIL who was causing chaos — her father-in-law lied to her husband and told him they had their identity stolen to get him to talk to them.
“Their identities weren’t stolen,” she wrote. “Instead my father-in-law just spent the call screaming/cursing at us & saying unforgivable things about my family.”
Days before their second wedding anniversary, Shelby’s mother-in-law was caught asking two content creators “to publicly attack my husband and I.”
“And now my father-in-law won’t stop reaching out to my husband acting like nothing ever happened and trying to guilt him into having a relationship with them.
“The last year has been a lot,” she wrote in the video’s caption.
People in the comments section cheered Shelby on for maintaining her boundaries.
“Their reactions only further enforce that you’ve done nothing wrong and are doing well for yourself,” wrote one person.
“The best revenge is a life well-lived,” someone else commented. “Keep at it!!!”
“Time for new phone numbers and block them on social media! I’m sorry this happened to you!” a third person wrote.
And Shelby has a special message for those judging her for cutting off contact.
“You have to give them another chance since they’re family,” she wrote in the caption of a third video from September 24, pretending to be one of the people who judge.
“That’s not how it works lol,” she wrote in the video’s caption — completely nonplussed.
