Taylor Frankie Paul was supposed to save The Bachelorette. The show’s viewership has been in a steady decline for almost a decade, dropping from about 10 million viewers in 2010 to just under 3 million in its most recent season.The Bachelor, too, has been in a ratings free-fall, and so the tried-and-true method for the franchise of plucking a girl from one show and making her the star of the other, was no longer enough. The show needed more eyeballs, more attention, more headlines, if it wanted to turn things around. So, for the first time in 22 seasons, they cast a lead who was already famous, just from something else. And for Paul, this was a chance to break from the ensemble of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and carry a reality tv show all on her own.
On Thursday, three days before the season was set to premiere, TMZ released a video from 2023, filmed by Paul’s ex-boyfriend, Dakota Mortensen. In the video, shot on a phone, Paul and Mortensen scream at each other. “This is called physical abuse,” Mortensen can be heard saying before the three-minute video escalates. Paul rushes at him, throwing her arms out as if to hit him. He fends her off, and then she picks up a metal barstool from under the counter and flings it at him. Then she throws another. Then another. Her daughter, who is sitting on the couch between them, is hit by the edge of one of the stools and begins to cry. The video ends with Mortensen demanding that Paul go help her child.
It is a gut-wrenching video of domestic violence, and in the wake of its release, ABC announced in a statement that they "made the decision to not move forward with the new season" of The Bachelorette "in light of the newly released video just surfaced.” It seems like a necessary and reasonable response to an awful situation, except that ABC and everyone else already knew about this incident. It was originally reported in 2023. There was a court case. Hulu, which is owned by Disney just like ABC, aired body cam footage from the police officers who arrived on that scene during season one of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where the incident was openly acknowledged by the whole cast. So the real question is how we got within three days of this season of The Bachelorette airing in the first place.
Taylor Frankie Paul’s rise to national fame has been fast and messy and filled with controversy. Before 2022, Paul and many other Mormon mothers in Utah made TikTok videos of themselves dancing together to popular songs and doing short sketches about their lives. They called their group of friends and frenemies “MomTok,” and branded themselves from the beginning as “powerful women” who were “challenging stigmas of gender roles in Mormon culture.” They were proving to the world that Mormon women could have public roles as content creators, and shake their asses. Doing this, MomTok achieved moderate but insular attention on the platform.
But the only way to become truly famous in this era is to break the containment of the algorithm. You need something juicy enough or stupid enough or strange enough to force people who are not your primary audience to become aware of you, and Paul had all three. In May 2022, Paul went on TikTok Live and dropped a bombshell.
Paul had married her now ex-husband Tate Paul in 2016 when she was 22 years old. They had two children together. And on that TikTok Live, Paul announced two incredibly scandalous things for a good Mormon influencer: She and Tate were getting a divorce, and that the reason for this was that she had “caught feelings” for another man because she and the other Mormon TikTokers were doing what they called “soft-swinging.”
It is still, four years later, difficult to get an exact read on what this soft-swinging entailed because almost everyone denies having been a part of it, except for Paul. But from what I have gathered from following all of these women and watching their television show, the controversy seems to be that these married Mormon adults were making-out, and in some cases doing a lot more, with people who were not their spouses at parties. All of this, from what has been reported, was consensual behavior between adults. But because of the strict rules of the Mormon church, the scandal exploded. Paul’s TikTok Live was covered by TMZ and People.
The idea of good Mormon wives having kinky parties was salacious. It was sexy. It was… a great television concept. Producers, smelling blood in the water, began circling the group. Would they want to be on reality television? Would they want to be even more famous than before? Less than a year after the livestream, Paul and seven other women began filming. The first episode was released on Hulu in September 2024.
There is a darkness underneath the show that has existed from its very beginning. The premiere episode opens with a bunch of newscasters voices laid on top of each other saying over and over again “Taylor Frankie Paul,” and then it cuts to her sitting up straight in a light pink dress, her dark hair highlighted blonde, her brown eyes as big and round and nervous as a bush baby under the bright lights. She is 28 years old in the premiere, a mother of two, and recently divorced.
From the beginning, Paul is presented as a mess. Everyone in MomTok is mad at her for either spreading their business to the world or implicating that they were involved in the swinging when they actually were not. She is only one month divorced from her husband during the pilot, but she is dating a new man (Mortensen) and he has asked her to be his girlfriend. She has said yes, but already there is drama. At a restaurant with another member of the group, Paul says that not only have they already been fighting, but that after posting a video with him on TikTok many women on Reddit said that they had been seeing him too.
From the beginning there are trust issues, and there is also another problem: Paul says she needs to take a pregnancy test. Throughout the series, Paul’s parents (especially her mom) appear frequently. Paul’s mom, not unreasonably, does not want Taylor to date Dakota and in fact wants her to take some time for herself to resettle after the divorce. But when Paul confesses that she needs to take a pregnancy test in that first episode, her mother ridicules her for not going to talk to a bishop and says, “You just piss me off and I don’t wanna even talk to you,” and then walks away from her.
You get the feeling, as a viewer, that Paul is the villain of the show. Everyone is mad at her. Everyone thinks she’s messy and making problems for herself— because she is!— but there’s something so tragic about her even in that first episode, as if in a different circumstance with a different community and a better support system, if she hadn’t gotten married and had kids so young, she might actually have been fine.
But of course, that’s not the situation she’s in. Her situation is much, much worse.
The final scene of the premiere episode starts with the 9-1-1 call, the words of an anonymous caller written on a black screen: “there is like, domestic violence, like somebody is screaming like, “get off me.” [...] The garage door keeps opening and shutting. It sounds like she’s trying to get out.” The show tells us that on February 17, 2023, police arrived at Paul’s house to investigate a report made by a neighbor that people were screaming inside.
There is bodycam footage credited in the show to an unnamed Herriman Police Department Officer. We, the viewer, see him arrive at their house, and you can tell from Paul’s voice that she is uncontrollably sobbing. “He threw me out in the garage,” she says. “Because she is attacking the crap out of me,” Mortensen says, exasperated.
Paul and Mortensen bicker like children. The officer separates them. In the bodycam footage, we see Taylor lean against the wall of her house, bent over sobbing, apologizing. “I peed my pants because I was so scared of him,” she tells the officer. “He pushed me into the wooden thing, and so I reacted.” She is wearing what appears to be the same white shirt that she wears in the video released by TMZ on Thursday.
And then there is a black screen that reads VIDEO REDACTED BY THE HERRIMAN POLICE DEPARTMENT. Over it, Mortensen’s voice says, “she was launching those metal chairs at me[...] I was actually a little bit scared for my life there.”
After this moment, an officer arrests Paul for domestic violence. We the viewer see the cuffs go on her hands. And that is the end of the first episode.
Though Paul’s daughter is not mentioned at all in the version of events that Hulu chose to portray on the show, the public record included her. “The man told Paul to stop throwing chairs because her 5-year-old daughter was next to him on the couch, but she then threw another chair, which struck the child in the head, the footage indicates. The girl is heard crying after being hit, police said, and a detective was later informed that the child had a painful ‘goose-egg’ injury to her head,” court documents, obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune in August 2023, state. That certainly sounds an awful lot like the video released by TMZ on Thursday. The child’s injury was also mentioned in the public statement made by Harriman Police Department in February 2023 after Paul’s arrest. In their report, TMZ states that officers on the scene saw the video that night.
In court, Paul entered a plea in abeyance to a third-degree felony of aggravated assault and the four other charges were dismissed with prejudice. The plea deal required her to obtain both substance abuse and domestic violence evaluation, be submitted to drug testing, and serve one day in jail. All of this happened before the first episode even aired.
Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is not, and has never been a light-hearted show. There are moments of levity, but beneath it all is this dark undercurrent of trauma and repression and fear. And people love to watch that. The second seasons whipped up 5 million views in its first five days streaming. There is something almost vintage about The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Most reality television shows today aren’t this messy. The participants are already rich, already have agents, and already know how to behave in front of a massive audience. The Housewives franchise is basically scripted television at this point, and competition shows like Survivor have become more about strategy than seeing real people destroy themselves. Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, though, feels more like the Real World or early Vanderpump Rules than it does like a reality show of the 2020s, and I think that’s why it has been so popular. It’s rare to hear someone on television say something cutting to a loved one anymore. People are more aware of the cameras, more controlled. But not these women.
“We treated Top Model as a documentary and we told the girls that no matter what happens while you’re on camera, we are going to document it.” Producer Ken Mok said in Netflix’s Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. That documentary then features contestant Shandi Sullivan claiming that she was black out drunk and was sexually assaulted, and that production filmed it all, and aired most of it. Everyone in the documentary talks about the decisions that were made as if they are ancient. “It just so happens that a lot of things that are now 20/20 for me happened in front of the world.” Tyra Banks says about mistakes they made in the filming and creation of the show. “Bull fucking shit,” former contestant Dani Evans says in response to that.
The implication is that production chose good television at the expense of the people on camera. The premise of this documentary—as we’ve also seen with the revisionist history around Britney Spears’s 2007 breakdown— is that we should have known better back then, and that nobody in their right mind would make the same mistakes today. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is proof that things haven’t changed. Producers still think that a felony makes for good TV.
And, it should be noted that The Bachelor franchise has a history of casting contestants with criminal records. Lincoln Adim—a contestant on Becca Kufrin’s 2018 season—was charged in 2016 with indecent assault and battery of a woman. Production claimed that they never knew about this, and that the third-party company they employ for background checks failed to find the charge. Production also failed to find a breaking-and-entering charge for Devin Strader, who appeared on the 2024 season, according to reporting by Collider. Several other contestants have come under fire after the season started airing for a history of liking racist and transphobic tweets. In 2018, tweets surfaced that one of the suitors (Lee Garrett) for Rachel Lindsay (the first black Bachelorette) had once equated the NAACP with the KKK. After this, Bachelor producers promised to “do better.”
But in the case of Paul, the skeletons weren’t in the closet. They’d already been filmed. Everyone knew about this specific incident that has now blown up her season. Anyone who went on the show to date her would have had easy access to this information. No third-party companies were needed to run this background check.
In the past few months, the conflict between Paul and Mortensen has reignited. According to court records obtained by TMZ, Mortensen went to court over custody of their son Ever. Paul filed a response and counterclaim. TMZ also reported in mid-March that Mortensen had called the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, alleging that Paul had physically abused their son. In the midst of all of this, production on the next season of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has been paused, and NBC reported that on March 7 other members of the cast met with producers and executives at Disney to admit concerns about continuing production with Paul. There is currently an open domestic assault investigation with “allegations made in both directions” according to the Draper Police department.
When cast members recounted Paul’s behavior, according to NBC, Rob Mills, executive vice president of unscripted and alternative entertainment at Walt Disney Television, reportedly said, "I don’t know a lot, nor do I want to know too much." On the call, a cast member called it “concerning” that no one at Disney or Hulu wanted to see the video.
There is a question repeated over and over again by members of the show during the first season of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. “Will MomTok survive this?” the stars ask in their confessionals after one of them lies to another, or someone gets pregnant again, or one of their husbands threatens to beat someone up. But there is a greater question that someone higher up than any them needed to be asking long before this blew up into a whole mess: should MomTok, or The Bachelorette, survive this?
