The Not-At-All-Secret Life Of Taylor Frankie Paul

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 Wive s 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.