Between the release of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Season 4 and the scheduled premiere of The Bachelorette Season 22, an alarming video surfaced via TMZ including footage from Taylor Frankie Paul’s 2023 domestic violence arrest, depicting her hitting, kicking, and throwing furniture at her ex, Dakota Mortensen. Her child was present throughout. While this incident had always been publicly known, the public had never seen the footage… until now.
In the video, Taylor grabs a metal barstool and hurls it at Dakota. He can be heard saying, “your daughter is sitting right there.” At that moment, the 5-year-old girl — curled up on the couch — begins crying. Even this doesn’t break Taylor away from her rage in that moment. She remains transfixed. The police report states she later had a “goose egg on her head.”
Shortly after the footage was published, ABC confirmed the season was canceled — the same day Taylor was trotted out for several interviews on the morning show circuit to promote the series.
“In light of the newly released video that surfaced today, we have made the decision not to move forward with the new season of The Bachelorette at this time, and our focus is on supporting the family,” a spokesperson for Disney Entertainment Television said in a statement. The season had been set to premiere this Sunday.
Taylor’s spokesperson’s response to the TMZ video called it “the latest installment of [Mortensen’s] never-ending, desperate, attention-seeking, destructive campaign to harm Taylor without any regard for the consequences for their child.”
I want to be careful here, because Taylor’s relationship with Dakota is genuinely complicated, and I believe he is capable of his own despicable behavior. The show has documented that complexity across its four seasons. But from a pure crisis communications standpoint, this statement is a disaster.
The moment footage exists — especially behavior involving a child — the only defensible response is accountability and forward-looking messaging. Pivoting immediately to attack the person who released the video, before acknowledging what’s in it, reads as evasive. And evasive, in a moment like this, is worse than silence.
Whoever is doing her PR is not familiar with crisis comms, and this speaks to just how many so-called industry professionals are steering these women in the wrong direction, collecting a check while the house burns down.
Follow the Money
When ABC cast Taylor Frankie Paul as its next Bachelorette, the network knew they were making a ballsy move. TFP was a significant departure from the squeaky-clean Christian leads of most seasons past — already a reality star in her own right, with three young children from two different fathers, a divorcée. Even the way the news broke was unconventional, announcing the news on an episode of Call Her Daddy rather than through their own channels.
Despite all these qualifications and the flashy marketing, the casting is simply low-hanging fruit. The kind of idea that looks brilliant in a slide deck and falls apart the moment someone asks a single question. Yeah, okay, she has 6.1 million TikTok followers who are deeply invested in her love life. Sure, it makes sense… if your only filter is buzz, with no regard for consequence.
It’s also worth noting that a Black woman with this exact record would never have gotten an opportunity to lead a legacy franchise. ABC’s willingness to rationalize Taylor Paul’s red flags is not unrelated to the grace that gets extended to white women in the public eye. Whiteness functioned as a mitigating factor in that risk assessment, whether anyone in that room said so out loud or not.
Part of my job is vetting talent for campaigns and activations. When we go through that exercise, we weigh “risk factors” against a talent’s “mediability” or their cultural cache, against any mitigating factors. When it comes to legal issues, violent charges are always the worst-case scenario. They are uniquely difficult to defend, uniquely repellent to brand partners and audiences, and uniquely impossible to contextualize your way out of once footage exists.
Taylor Frankie Paul was cast as the next Bachelorette when her 2023 arrest was already fully public. The incident was covered during Season 1 of the Hulu series, meaning ABC knowingly cast a talent with a violent charge on her record and a chaotic, still-ongoing situationship with her accuser, then proceeded to film an entire season and plan a premiere. Paul’s Bachelorette season wrapped production in December — two months before the latest alleged domestic incident with Dakota.
The network probably saw Paul and the chaos that followed her as a calculated risk, figuring ratings would be worth whatever controversy her season could create. I can say with near certainty that the PR and corp comms teams at ABC and Disney fought against this, but the marketing team won.
To be abundantly clear: nothing here is a defense of Taylor Paul or her behavior. What was shown in the video is inexcusable. A child was physically harmed. But accountability for her actions and accountability for the industry machine that put her in this position are not mutually exclusive, and the latter has gone largely unscathed.
In late February, police made contact with both Taylor and Dakota on February 24 and 25 amid a new alleged domestic incident, with the Draper City Police Department confirming an open domestic assault investigation and that “allegations have been made in both directions.” Details remain limited as the investigation is ongoing.
On March 7, Disney convened a Zoom with the full Mormon Wives cast. Three Disney executives attended, including Rob Mills, EVP of unscripted and alternative entertainment at Walt Disney Television. Cast members agreed on the call to pause filming until TFP’s legal situation was resolved. One cast member told executives: “It’s a dangerous situation, it’s a sad situation, and we don’t know how to navigate it because Taylor is our friend.”
As cast members shared their accounts of Paul’s alleged behavior, Mills said, “I don’t know a lot, nor do I want to know too much.” When a cast member asked directly if he was “aware she’s hurt a child,” Mills replied, “I don’t think, for us, getting into it is right.”
So there we have it: Taylor Frankie Paul was not remotely ready to become the Bachelorette. Her friends knew it. Her castmates knew it. ABC and Hulu knew it — and then kept filming anyway, kept promoting anyway, kept her on a press run through the week of the premiere. As recently as Wednesday, a network source told Yahoo the show was still expected to premiere as scheduled. The Bachelor franchise has been dying for quite some time, yet instead of evolving, ABC clung onto it and attempted to breathe life back into it with guaranteed drama and a disregard for what actually made the show compelling at one time.
This is the outcome of viewing human beings as content and drama as dollars. When you put profit over quality, when you disregard the flags, when you mistake cultural momentum for personal readiness — this is what you get. You face plant, you lose revenue, brand partners pull out, and you cause genuine turmoil in people’s real lives.
The Issue Going Unaddressed
Danielle Pistotnik at Select Management Group first signed Taylor, Mayci and others, about two years before the swinging scandal broke. Select’s Lisa Filipelli later stepped in and brought on a production partner with a relationship at Hulu, ultimately landing the deal for SLOMW. These folks are largely credited with making these women famous, as all six cast members are managed by this agency.
This season, I found myself questioning their approach. We saw Jen Affleck join Dancing with the Stars eight weeks postpartum. Whitney had to balance her existing career, motherhood, DWTS, and a million different opportunities including a Broadway run as Roxie Hart in Chicago. Mayci was juggling being postpartum while going on a book tour for her memoir. And Layla, a single mom, was being prepared to potentially move to New York City for three months had Ford Models signed her. All of this, under a nearly relentless filming schedule. (Notice they’ve released 4 seasons in 2 years!)
Select also manages Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles, who in the months following the very public and painful stripping of her bronze medal was simultaneously competing collegiately at UCLA, appearing on Dancing with the Stars, releasing a memoir, and maintaining ambassador deals with Nike, Beats by Dre and Netflix.
It’s one thing to help talent level up and ~get their bag.~ It’s another to optimize for revenue at the expense of sustainability and of the personal lives these women have explicitly put on camera as their entire brand. When a single mom is being prepared to move to New York City for three months, when a woman who just gave birth is being booked for DWTS eight weeks postpartum, someone in the room should be asking: is this right for her life, or just right for her career? The entertainment industry runs on relationships, and it’s perfectly normal for deals to take time to come to fruition. “We’re interested, but now is not the right time” is a very common, perfectly acceptable statement to make when booking gigs.
The House Always Wins
As corporations grow desperate in a sinking economy, the machine gets hungrier. ABC didn’t cast Taylor Frankie Paul because someone believed in her. They cast her because someone sold her a view-booster, and everyone in that room was too busy chasing the numbers to push back. Meanwhile, the reps who built these women into a franchise are playing the same game — optimizing for maximum output in minimum time, because that’s what the market rewards. Nobody in this story set out to blow up a person’s life. They set out to make money. The difference between those two things stopped mattering a long time ago.