Content warning: This story contains graphic depictions of domestic violence.
Taylor Frankie Paul’s reality TV career started with “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a Hulu show whose first episode ends with her in handcuffs after police are called about a domestic disturbance.
Three years later, she was set to debut as the Bachelorette — before a new round of allegations of violence and footage of the 2023 incident led to a production pause on the fifth season of “Secret Lives” and the cancellation of this season’s “Bachelorette.”
“In light of the newly released video just surfaced today, we have made the decision to not move forward with the new season of ‘The Bachelorette’ at this time, and our focus is on supporting the family,” a Disney Entertainment employee told TMZ and The Wall Street Journal.
The news follows other public consequences like Cinnabon withdrawing from sponsorship deals with both shows. The decisions have started conversations of how the entertainment industry should handle real-life allegations of domestic violence.
ABC could not be reached for comment.
What do we know about what happened last month?
Very little is known about the incident: People reported that there is an open domestic violence assault investigation into Paul and her ex, Dakota Mortensen, relating to contacts on February 24 and February 25. The Draper City Police Department told Us Weekly that “allegations have been made in both directions” and no further information could be shared about an ongoing case.
TMZ and People reported that Mortensen filed an order for protection against Paul this week, asking for temporary custody of their son. TMZ said his petition alleged Paul was physically violent with Mortensen in front of the couple’s child.
What happened in 2023?
This isn’t the first time Paul has been accused of domestic abuse. She was arrested in 2023 and charged with aggravated assault, domestic violence in the presence of a child, child abuse and criminal mischief. She pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and the other charges were dropped.
Police documents viewed by The Salt Lake City Tribune at the time said Paul was accused of physical violence toward both Mortensen and her then-5-year-old daughter. Paul contested this account of events after entering her plea.
On Thursday, TMZ released a video from the 2023 incident showing Paul kicking and slapping Mortensen while he films. She is seen throwing metal chairs at him, and he says one of them hits her daughter. Half the video is audio-only, and it ends with Mortensen opening the door to a police officer.
Paul’s representative told TMZ the video was “selectively edited” and released to “distract from [Mortensen’s] own behavior.”
Disney, the parent company of Hulu and ABC, said the video release was part of the reason they canceled “The Bachelorette.”
What have they said about this most recent incident?
Before the cancellation, Paul mostly deflected questions about the latest controversy during a Wednesday appearance on “Good Morning America.”
Through a representative, Mortensen didn’t directly address last month’s incident other than to say he wants to have a positive relationship with Paul and to focus on being a good co-parent.
Paul’s representative shared a statement with People on Thursday after the announcement that her “Bachelorette” season was canceled.
“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,” a spokesperson said.
“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. Taylor has remained silent out of fear of further abuse, retaliation and public shaming. She is currently exploring all of her options, seeking support, and preparing to own and share her story.”
Who are the women of ‘Secret Lives’?
“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” follows a close-knit group of Mormon women originally famous for their TikTok videos. Paul caused a massive scandal on #MomTok in 2022 when she announced an affair and subsequent divorce. Viewers latched onto Paul’s claim that social media’s favorite Mormon mothers were privately exploring a form of consensual nonmonogamy known as “soft swinging.”
The women of #MomTok are upfront about challenging gender stereotypes in the Mormon community. Several “wives” are divorceés, and some cast members are more lenient with following church guidance around substance use. The stars all outearn their husbands, a point of tension given their patriarchal faith and emphasis on men as the breadwinners.
How has ‘Secret Lives’ or Bachelor Nation dealt with abuse in the past?
Several women on “Secret Lives” have a history of sexual abuse and talk openly about it on the show. Mayci Neeley is open about a past abusive relationship, and tells Mortensen his behavior toward Paul is reminiscent of that dynamic. A major plot line in season four is how Mikayla Matthews and her husband struggle with intimacy issues due to her history of childhood sexual abuse.
The very first episode of the series ends with body camera footage of Paul’s 2023 arrest stemming from a domestic disturbance. But the next episode jumps 11 months into the future, with Paul and Mortensen back together, skipping the fallout from the assault.
“Bachelor In Paradise,” a show following multiple couples under the Bachelor franchise, paused production in 2017 after one cast member accused the other of sexual assault.
What should we keep in mind about domestic abuse allegations?
Media researcher Soraya Giaccardi Vargas noted that viewers don’t have the full picture of Paul and Mortensen’s relationship. She said audiences are most primed to recognize physical violence as abuse, but other forms like coercive control or surveilling a partner are hard to depict — or detect — onscreen.
“When abuse becomes entertainment, we can become desensitized to the severity of the topic,” Giaccardi Vargas said. “We only have pieces of the puzzle, and we don’t necessarily know how it will all play out. But what I’ve seen in the discourse so far is a lot of folks that have already jumped to a conclusion about where the responsibility lies.”
This matters because the audience will probably never really know what happened between Paul and Mortensen. When trying to piece together what is going on behind the cameras, viewers are likely to compare real people to the mythical perfect victim.
A survivor with agency doesn’t fit the narrative that real victims are weak, White, calm, cisgender women. Survivors are often punished by the justice system for fighting back against their abuser, leading to a situation where they are demonized and incarcerated for what is seen as self-defense.
Given this, it’s not uncommon for both people in a relationship to accuse each other of abuse. Sometimes “mutual abuse” is used as a tactic to discredit survivors by shifting the focus to how they chose to defend themselves from abuse.
“There can be situations in which, again, someone’s response to violence can be mischaracterized, or it can be taken out of context by not acknowledging that sometimes the response is a defensive response,” Giaccardi Vargas said.
What are experts saying about production decisions?
The “Secret Lives” pause is a marker of advancement for the entertainment industry as a whole, Kimberly Bautista, founder and executive director of survivor storytelling nonprofit Justice For My Sister, said before ABC’s decision. “There’s an immediate accountability that is coming up.”
Bautista’s nonprofit trains marginalized survivors of gender-based violence on trauma-informed storytelling methods, and works with production executives to foster safe environments for those narratives. Popular depictions of domestic abuse often blame the survivor or don’t address the harm at all, she said.
“The responsibility does, at the end of the day, lie with the executives that are green lighting and approving these stories to go forward,” she said.
After ABC’s announcement that it was pulling the season, Bautista said the decision reflects the amount of scrutiny that would come if the season ran as intended.
“Networks understand that we are in a moment of reckoning in our nation, and they’re signaling they’re not willing to cosign toxic celebrities with track records of domestic abuse in the way that they have in the past,” she wrote over email. “Now if only executives and the public at large would hold that same standard for influential men named the Epstein files,” referencing the elites who were shown to have had relationships with billionaire sex offender Jeffery Epstein through the release of case files from the Department of Justice.
Giaccardi Vargas commended the decision not to air this season. “It’s not always easy for networks to put people over profit, and reality TV has long avoided breaking ‘the fourth wall’ in favor of letting the drama play out on-screen. This move is a reflection of an increased understanding of the responsibility that networks have both to cast members and to audiences with regards to ethical storytelling,” she wrote over email.
Audiences are experiencing a dissonance between social media videos of Paul playing with her kids while also hearing accusations involving abuse in front of a child, said Fortesa Latifi, author of the forthcoming “Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online.”
Even though Paul’s brand has always leaned into the messiness of being a mom, social media projects only part of the picture. “Online motherhood is often portrayed as frictionless and perfect. And of course, these kinds of allegations completely shatter that illusion,” Latifi said.
Both Latifi and Bautista said that platforming Paul amid new allegations would risk normalizing this kind of violence.
“I think it’s important that the networks respond to this moment and really become more conscientious of what it is that they’re greenlighting, who it is that they are platforming, whose narratives they are centering,” Bautista said.
What can reality TV do to change the public perception of domestic violence?
“When abuse becomes entertainment, we can become desensitized to the severity of the topic and the importance of the topic, and it kind of generally just flattens all the discourse into this, you know, gotcha commentary that is failing to account for any nuance,” Giaccardi Vargas said.
“Unfortunately, a lot of times the format of reality TV capitalizes on toxicity and unhealthy relationships,” Bautista said. She wants to see more portrayals of healthy conflict resolution, because popular media tends to give us only a blueprint for bad relationships. There’s also an opportunity for networks to educate their audiences on domestic violence prevention.
The way TV chooses to engage with domestic violence has real-world consequences. “So often when cases of domestic violence are silenced, that does result in perpetuation of these cases,” Bautista said. “Many times, survivors stay in abusive relationships for years because they internalize that external messaging and they tend to blame themselves as well.”
Reporter Marissa Martinez contributed to this report.
Confidential, anonymous help is available 24/7 through the National Domestic Violence Hotline at (1-800-799-7233) or online.