Trust-aware clustering plays a vital role in addressing the security issues faced by mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). The trust worthiness of each participated node is to be estimated for ensuring the secure communications in MANETs. In this article, we propose a new trust-based secure energy-aware clustering (TSEAC) model to mitigate the malicious nodes from the network and form secure energy aware clusters with a cluster head which is more stable and trustworthy. Moreover, two novel algorithms namely energy-efficient trust-aware secure clustering algorithm and filtering untrustworthy recommendation (FUR) algorithm are proposed in this work. Here, the trust value of a node is measured by both direct trust estimation and indirect trust estimation methods using the Beta distribution technique. The trust value of the node is estimated in terms of the behavior of the node. The role of the FUR algorithm is to enhance the clustering process by mitigating the trust-distortion attack. Thus, from the simulation results it is observed that the proposed work, TSEAC outperforms in improving the lifetime of the network by 38% than the other existing work such as CBTRP, AOTDV, and CBRP. Furthermore, TSEAC shows an improvement of 20% to 24% when compared to CBTRP, 27% to 31% in contrast to AOTDV and 35% to 42% superior to CBRP in terms of packet delivery ratio. Similarly, TSEAC shows 22% to 26%, 28% to 33%, and 34% to 38% better throughput in contrast to CBTRP, AOTDV, and CBRP, respectively. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.