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There will be no new season of The Bachelorette this week. Instead, there’s more sinister viewing on hand. This coming Sunday, Taylor Frankie Paul was set to make her debut as the first Bachelorette lead who was new to the franchise. But in the run-up to the premiere, domestic violence allegations against Paul from February were made public. Worse came on Thursday, when TMZ published a video from 2023 of Paul hitting her ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen. In its wake, ABC decided to shelve the season. “Our focus is on supporting the family,” a statement from a Disney Entertainment Television spokesperson reads in part.
ABC can’t play dumb about this—Paul’s 2023 arrest wrapped up the series premiere of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the Hulu show on which Paul got her start on TV. But the newly leaked footage from that incident makes a season with Paul as the Bachelorette impossible to parse. In the footage, Mortensen is trying to get away from her as she kicks and punches him, all while her 5-year-old daughter is in the room. When Paul throws a few chairs at Mortensen, her daughter is seemingly struck in the head. (Both Paul and Mortensen have alleged that the other has been abusive. “After years of silently suffering extensive mental and physical abuse as well as threats of retaliation, Taylor is finally gaining the strength to face her accuser and taking steps to ensure that she and her children are protected from any further harm,” reads a statement from Paul’s spokesperson, released after the season was pulled. “There are too many women who are suffering in silence as they survive aggressive, jealous ex-partners who refuse to let them move on with their lives.”)
Even before the video footage came out, Paul was still a controversial choice for The Bachelorette. She first became famous online for being hot and dancing on TikTok (many such cases), but her fame became infamy when she exposed herself, her fellow Mormon friends, and all their husbands as swingers. She got divorced—a mini-scandal within her Salt Lake City community of young wives and mothers—and her social ostracism became the impetus for Secret Lives, which just premiered its fourth season. In a scant two years, the show has transformed into a drama nebula far beyond just Paul’s storyline. There are more divorces, more cheating, and more infighting, and the women are increasingly more famous. While Paul was set for ABC, her colleagues Jen Affleck and Whitney Leavitt were contestants on the most recent season of Dancing With the Stars, and Leavitt has since joined Chicago on Broadway. (She’s playing Roxie. Obviously.)
How did Paul, you might be wondering, become the Bachelorette without ever having competed on the show? Why, simply by being the most troubling, unnerving, worryingly insecure figure on reality television.
Paul was always going to be a complicated star. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives ceased filming for Season 5 last week, after the Draper City Police Department confirmed that there was an open domestic assault investigation between Paul and Mortensen. But up until TMZ released that video, she was giving the network exactly what it wanted in picking her to be the new Bachelorette.
In Paul, the franchise would have gotten the most bombastic and vulnerable lead in its history. Unlike any other contestant, she’s a reality TV figure who’s already used to public attention and doesn’t require the kid gloves that production might employ with a civilian. In the days after the second domestic violence allegation made news, Paul posted a TikTok video about how this particular jag of negative online attention “isn’t my first, second, or even my third rodeo.” That’s certainly true, and it almost meant that the show could fully get in the mud with the rest of us.
It’s unlikely Paul’s season will ever see the light of day, but the premiere, which was made available to critics before screeners were pulled on Thursday, already betrayed a woman dominated by fear of rejection. In the first episode, Paul is trembling, anxious, often weeping. She spends much of it talking about herself like a liability: how hard she is to love, how complicated her life is, how she hasn’t usually made good choices. She asks rhetorically why anyone would be in love with her, and when the context around her includes allegations—and now video proof—of domestic abuse, there’s no answer even a generous audience could give her.
Season 4 of Secret Lives premiered barely a week ago, capturing much of the run-up to Paul’s appearance on The Bachelorette. Now it’s a documentary of an unbelievable fumble. ABC should have seen it coming, but surely the network will find a way to recoup this enormous loss. With its sterling record, I wouldn’t put it past ABC to give us Mortensen as the next Bachelor.
