Episode 170:
A TikToker Who Married Six Killers in Prison
A woman in a black dress stands alone in the middle of an empty road, smiling, holding up a photo of a man. It is her wedding photo, and there is no groom in it. The woman is Ash Trevino, a former dental office receptionist from Texas with more than half a million followers on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. She calls herself a "prison wife." The men she marries and dates are inmates, and she has livestreamed the relationships for years.
At 37, she went live on Instagram after a stay in jail, showing off bruises from the handcuffs and telling viewers they were kind of cute. She has tattooed criminals' names on her wrist and celebrated their crimes, and the stranger her content became, the larger her audience grew.
The Girl Who Begged to Go to Prison
The attraction has a name: hybristophilia, a sexual attraction to people who have committed crimes, and to the crimes themselves. For Ash, it began in childhood. Every weekend her father visited his best friend in prison and brought his children along. Her siblings cried and refused to go. Ash begged to. Her father's friend was a troublemaker even inside, and at every visit he was brought out in handcuffs and shackles. To the young Ash it did not look frightening. It looked exciting. She grew up watching police reality shows and crime documentaries, drawn to what she saw as the wild, untamed men behind bars. For years, though, her life was ordinary, and her social media showed it, until 2019.
The First Husband
Ash and Isaiah Gonzalez had known each other since childhood; their families attended the same church, and when she was fifteen and he was nine she joked that she would marry him someday. At 7:30 p.m. on April 18, 2010, Mohamed Hashemi, 50, the owner of a gas station in Texas, set off to deposit the day's takings at the bank. His 18-year-old clerk, Ruben Hernandez, texted that the boss was on his way. Waiting on the road were 21-year-old Eric Maldonado and Isaiah, then 15. They cut off Hashemi's car, and when he tried to run, they shot him dead, dragged his body into the woods and set his car on fire. Isaiah was paid $900, spent it on drugs, and was sentenced to 45 years. Hashemi left a wife and seven children; the youngest was one. In March 2019, lonely, Ash messaged Isaiah through JPay, an app that lets people message inmates, make video calls and send them money. After five months of letters they decided to marry. Every weekend she got up at 2 a.m. to drive three hours to see him, and three months later they married inside the prison. She tattooed his name on her wrist and filmed it all for TikTok as "The Life of a Prison Wife," and the videos drew attention her old content never had. When Hashemi's daughter joined one of her livestreams, Ash saw a chance for views and donations. She told her that her father got what he deserved and, because he was Muslim, asked how many of the 9/11 hijackers had been named Mohamed. When COVID halted prison visits in 2020, the two drifted apart. They divorced the following year.
Seventy Boyfriends
Her visits had already put her in touch with other inmates, and her next husband was Noe Trevino, 30, a convicted murderer who had also served time for assaulting a child. The worse his record, the more engagement she got. He tattooed her face on his arm; the marriage ended the same year when she found he was in touch with an ex-girlfriend. She said she had dated 26 inmates; the real number was later reported to be as high as seventy, most serving time for robbery or murder. Many she found on Write a Prisoner, a pen-pal site where inmates post their photos, ages and crimes. She won them over by paying for their phone calls and putting money in their commissary accounts, and she streamed it all. Each man's name went on her body next to the last, sometimes over an old one. In 2024 she dated an inmate named Jesse for nine months without, she said, ever seeing his face, and promised her viewers they would check into a hotel to have a baby when he got out. She went live outside the prison on his release day; five thousand people watched, and she gained thirty thousand followers. They split two weeks later. Her next boyfriend was Francisco Montero, a Washington state gang member accused, with another man, of murdering a 13-year-old girl and a 19-year-old woman. When viewers posted messages mourning the victims during her livestreamed calls with him, she read them aloud and mocked them. In December 2024 she featured on an explicit song bragging about a sexual relationship with a 19-year-old seventeen years her junior, and on one drunken livestream she exposed herself to 13,000 viewers.
Final Thoughts
Ash is the mother of two daughters, now teenagers, whom she left largely to her parents to raise. Isaiah, from prison, played with the girls over the phone, helped with their homework and prayed with them at bedtime, and when the marriage ended, so did that relationship. When her address leaked online, people egged the house and threw rocks through the windows, and the girls were bullied at school until they moved in with their grandparents. Her TikTok account was reported, suspended and reinstated repeatedly, and in 2025 a petition called for it to be banned. What finally stopped the "prison wife" content was a court. For five years she had hidden her income and claimed welfare as a low-income parent. In exchange for admitting it, she received two years of probation, with the conviction to be cleared if she complied, and one condition: no romantic contact with anyone who has a criminal record. She agreed. Two months on, she appears to be complying. Whether the men were ever more to her than content is a question only she can answer.
Ash Trevino turned relationships with men convicted of murder into livestreams that drew donations, and at times she mocked their victims and the victims' families on air. Should platforms like TikTok allow creators to profit from content built around real crimes when the victims' families are still alive to see it?
WE DOCUMENT.
YOU DECIDE.
Our interpretation is only one possible perspective.
