'The Bachelorette' Controversy is Nothing New for Reality TV

Bad behavior is an asset for aspiring reality stars, whether they're a "soft-swinging" Mormon mom or a serially bankrupt real estate heir

Taylor Frankie Paul (Disney/Michael Kirchoff)

Who could have seen it coming — except anyone with eyes, ears, and passing knowledge of reality TV history?

Last week, ABC yanked the latest season of The Bachelorette from the air just days before it was scheduled to premiere. The latest installment of the long-running dating show was set to focus on Taylor Frankie Paul, a thirty-one-year-old single mom who also stars in the Hulu series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, as she looked for love.

On Thursday, TMZ published a video showing Paul in a violent altercation with her on-and-off-again boyfriend, Dakota Mortenson, in 2023. Paul can be seen pushing, kicking, and hurling multiple barstools at Mortenson, while her daughter, then five, rests on a couch nearby. At one point, the child, apparently hit by one of the stools, can be heard crying. “This is called physical abuse,” says Mortenson, who is recording the video on his phone.

The video’s release followed news that The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives had stopped filming after another domestic dispute involving Paul and Mortenson last month. A few hours after the video was made public on Thursday, Disney-owned ABC announced it would not be airing Paul’s season of The 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,” said a Disney Entertainment spokesperson.

The network’s carefully worded statement made it seem as if the shocking video had exposed previously unknown behavior. In fact, Paul’s alleged history of violence is a key storyline on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which follows a clique of Utah influencers who call themselves “MomTok.”

The premiere episode of the series includes police body cam footage filmed in the immediate aftermath of the altercation captured in the TMZ video. An officer tells her she is being charged with domestic violence and places her in handcuffs.

Subsequent episodes of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives chronicled Paul’s turbulent relationship with Mortenson, including the birth of their son Ever in 2024. Paul, who has two other children by her ex-husband, ultimately pleaded guilty to aggravated assault for the 2023 incident. Her Secret Lives co-stars reportedly voiced concerns about Paul’s allegedly dangerous behavior in a call with ABC meetings weeks ago. But it took the video — and the cries of an apparently injured child — to finally disqualify her as a romantic leading lady.

By casting Paul, a divisive social media star with millions of followers, ABC was clearly making a high-risk attempt to revitalize an aging, scandal-ridden franchise. But the ill-advised attempt at corporate synergy with Disney-owned Hulu backfired spectacularly. According to the Los Angeles Times, ABC faces a potential loss of $70 million as a result of the season’s cancellation. The numerous shows that comprise the Bachelor universe have weathered controversies over racism, sexual assault, and hasty divorces.

The Bachelorette scandal is a tale as old as time — or at least as old as reality TV, which has always thrived on shock value.

Joseph Duggar in a mugshot last week (Photo provided by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)

Case in point: Paul was not even the only reality TV personality involved in an abuse scandal last week. On Wednesday, Joseph Duggar, a former star of the TLC series 19 Kids and Counting, was arrested and charged with molesting a nine-year-old girl. His older brother Josh, who once worked for the Family Research Council in DC and featured prominently in the series until it was reported that he’d molested his sisters as a child, was convicted of receiving and possessing child sexual abuse materials in 2021.

Since it first exploded a quarter century ago, reality TV has placed a premium on messy personal drama and turned countless poorly-vetted fame-seekers — from scamming Real Housewives to negligent pageant moms — into celebrities. Cynical TV producers, more interested in boosting ratings than maintaining ethical standards, are all too often happy to turn a blind eye to red flags, no matter how glaring.

Back when reality TV was in its infancy in 2000, Fox aired Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire?, a special in which 50 women participated in a pageant-like competition to marry a wealthy man named Rick Rockwell. It later turned out that Rockwell had been the subject of a restraining order nine years earlier. The incident became a short-lived PR nightmare for Fox, which was soon back at the exploitation game with shows like Joe Millionaire and The Swan. (Incidentally, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire? was created by Mike Fleiss, the same guy who brought The Bachelor to the world two years later.)

There are numerous other examples of sketchy — and even dangerous — people winding up on reality TV. The most horrific example might be Ryan Jenkins, who appeared in multiple VH1 reality shows despite an assault conviction, and allegedly went on to murder and mutilate his wife, model Jasmine Fiore. (Jenkins killed himself before he could be arrested, but police never named another suspect in the crime.) The tragedy pushed the industry to adopt more stringent background checks.

But amplifying problematic personalities and making them more palatable to the general public through selective editing has always been the goal of reality TV. Consider our current president, Donald Trump, a serially bankrupt real estate heir who used The Apprentice to rebrand himself as a brilliant businessman and stage a successful political career. Muzzled by NDAs, crew members on The Apprentice worked tirelessly to make Trump seem smarter, more articulate, and less overtly racist than he was in private, reportedly even covering up his use of the N-word on set. But it’s not as if Trump was trying to hide his bigotry: by 2011, he was the most vocal proponent of the Birther theory. Yet NBC kept him on the air, perhaps because the network cared more about the free press Trump was generating than the vile racism he was stoking.

Taylor Frankie Paul at the Oscars on March 15 ((Disney/Eric McCandless))

But as ABC recently discovered, Americans have some standards — even in the Trump era — and a guilty pleasure reality show isn’t so much fun when it’s platforming an alleged abuser.

Even before The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives debuted in 2024, Paul was a figure of some infamy online. She went viral in 2022 when she revealed that she and her ex-husband had dabbled in “soft swinging” — i.e., physical intimacy but no sex — with other couples connected to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The saga blew up online and attracted the interest of reality TV producers eager to capitalize on public fascination with Mormons — particularly the women of “MomTok,” with their waterfall waves and dirty sodas, who seem to flout conservative church teachings while conforming to a very specific beauty ideal.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has become a breakout hit for Hulu, which has cranked out four seasons of the show in barely 18 months. Paul’s notoriety has exploded: she currently has 6.1 million followers on TikTok and 2.4 million on Instagram. Two of her co-stars appeared on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars. In September, ABC announced she would be the next Bachelorette, praising her “raw, unapologetic storytelling” and “comedic, heartwarming and bitingly honest content.”

But even by the subterranean standards of the Bachelor Nation, Paul’s casting was controversial. Paul would have been the first woman to lead The Bachelorette without first starring The Bachelor.

Perhaps most damaging was the revelation that she slept with Mortenson the night before she left to film the series. Fans of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette prefer when the leads at least pretend to be there for “the right reasons,” and not just to get (more) famous. Perhaps anticipating a large audience of rubberneckers and hate-watchers, ABC had been heavily promoting Paul’s upcoming season. She visited Good Morning America, turned up on the Oscars red carpet, and even appeared in a post-Oscars Bachelorette special.

For her part, Paul described the show as an opportunity to break out of an unhealthy relationship cycle. As she told the LA Times, “The only thing I can relate it to is, it is a drug; the toxicity is a drug.”

Paul may in fact be hooked on toxic behavior, but she’s clearly not the only one.

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Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian