Photo: Michael Friberg for New York Magazine
It was 3 p.m. on a November afternoon, and inside the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, seven men wearing the storied Chippendales uniform were onstage, dancing to royalty-free music to win over one woman. That woman, Taylor Frankie Paul, was there to determine which of them would be her husband.
We were on set for The Bachelorette, the long-running ABC reality series in which a group of suitors (22 this season) compete to get engaged to one woman. Here, group dates often involve good-natured humiliation rituals that vaguely correspond to a romantic theme. (Perform a rap to prove you’re “here for the right reasons!” “Fight for her heart” by boxing with Laila Ali!). The vibe at Chippendales was “What if chores were sexy?” One contestant in a Travis Kelce butt cut leaped over an ironing board; another held a tape measure to his crotch and stroked it. A third appeared with a baby doll and, unfortunately for everyone around, proceeded to grind on top of Paul, who was kind enough to at least pretend to be into it. “You guys did incredible, I’m speechless!” she told them. Between each dance was an excruciating silence during which network-TV producers monitored and reset their equipment while the men fidgeted onstage like excitable children. Every so often during these pauses, a young woman would shout, “We love you Taylor!” or “You look beautiful!” The dozens of women packed into the tiny theater (some of whom have flown to Vegas on their own dime) were there to see Paul as the Bachelorette. “She’s just so authentically herself,” a fan sipping a double tequila-soda told me. “She just says it straight.”
This quality is perhaps why Paul, 31, was slated to be the first Bachelorette in 22 seasons plucked not from the franchise’s existing roster of contestants but rather The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which debuted in 2024 to document the fallout of a soft-swinging scandal among a group of TikTokers known as MomTok. Paul was already an unlikely candidate for a franchise as traditional as The Bachelor. Her life as portrayed on Mormon Wives is that of a loose cannon who struggles to liberate herself from toxic romantic entanglements, running directly counter to The Bachelor’s fantasy of happily-ever-after.
But no one who wasn’t in the Chippendales theater will see the footage of the seven men onstage, nor the rest of Paul’s journey to find love, anytime soon. On March 19, days before the premiere, video footage of Paul’s 2023 domestic violence incident with her on-again, off again partner Dakota Mortensen appeared online. Disney, which owns ABC and Hulu, announced that it had “made the decision to not move forward with the new season of The Bachelorette at this time.” A spokesperson for Paul responded that Paul is “grateful for ABC’s support” and said, “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.”
“Taylor has remained silent out of fear of further abuse, retaliation, and public shaming,” the statement continued. “She is currently exploring all of her options, seeking support, and preparing to own and share her story.” (Mortensen did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Paul torpedoed into the collective consciousness on May 25, 2022. Then 28 and a prominent TikToker within the Mormon influencer-sphere but an unknown outside it, she announced via livestream that the real reason she and her husband were divorcing was because they’d been swinging with other couples and things got messy. They’d go to parties, drink, and hook up, the rules being that nobody go “all the way” unless their partner was in the room. “We had an agreement, all of us, and I did step out of that agreement,” she said on the stream, referring to one particularly drunken night when she and one of the men admitted to having feelings for each other and had sex separately from the group. Friendships fell apart; three couples who admitted to participating divorced. “I lost everything because of that,” she said on the stream.
Why then did she decide to air it all out for the internet to parse in what could have been a career-ending choice, particularly for a Mormon influencer?
On a snowy afternoon in mid-February, I met Paul in Salt Lake City. We were accompanied by a small army of publicists, producers, and managers inside a wintery yurt on the sixth floor of downtown’s Hyatt Regency hotel, where she told me the livestream was an act of reputation management. “I was being called this ‘best-friend husband-stealer,’” she said. “Had I not ever told the story, that’s all you would’ve known me as, and that’s not true. Yes, you can say that — but also tell them that you were sucking my husband’s dick, too. Don’t forget that.” This spikiness is an intrinsic part of Paul’s personality, one that endeared her to millions. “When you come at me, that’s a different level of ‘I will give it back to you,’” she said. “I’m not rising above. Actually, I’m raising hell.”
The news that a group of hot young Mormon moms were secretly husband-swapping went predictably viral, and shortly thereafter reality producers started circling. Seven months post-livestream, Paul started filming what would become the pilot of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives along with seven other women from MomTok. Though the show’s marketing dangled the prospect of seeing Mormons who’d been involved in drunken group sex, none of the women implicated in the scandal besides Paul initially agreed to film (Miranda McWhorter, who originally denied being part of the swinging but later admitted to being involved, would join in season two). Instead, the cast was rounded out by several MomTokers who were upset that Paul’s post implied that they, by virtue of being in MomTok, were also swinging. (Much like the Kardashians, who were once disappointed by Kim’s sex tape, all have benefited from it.)
But the narrative that would drive Paul’s story over four seasons of Mormon Wives even more than the swinging scandal was her tumultuous relationship with boyfriend Mortensen, whom she met on Instagram shortly after her divorce in 2022. On February 17, 2023, police responded to a 911 call made by a neighbor who’d heard screaming at Mortensen’s house. Body-cam footage, included at the end of Mormon Wives’s pilot episode, showed Paul on the front porch, sobbing and barely able to breathe. “She’s hammered,” Mortensen says, claiming that Paul had hurled metal chairs at him; Paul was then placed in handcuffs and charged with aggravated assault, criminal mischief, two counts of domestic violence in the presence of a child, and child abuse (her then-5-year-old daughter, who was sitting next to Mortensen, was allegedly hit by a barstool; her 2-year-old son was also in the room). Paul pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in exchange for the dismissal of all other charges. New phone footage leaked to TMZ appears to show Paul putting Mortensen in a chokehold and hurling metal chairs at him; a child cries. In a statement on March 19, a spokesperson for Paul told Variety: “It’s sad to see the latest installment of his never-ending, desperate, attention-seeking, destructive campaign to harm Taylor without any regard for the consequences for their child. Releasing an old video, which conveniently omits context, on their son’s birthday is a reprehensible attempt to distract from his own behavior.”
Paul has called that incident “the worst night of my life” and remains on probation, the terms of which prohibit drinking alcohol until August. Though she’s enjoying sobriety — “I think drinking would add a lot more confusion, chaos, and depression to my life,” she told me — she added the caveat that she’s someone who “never says never.” Her relationship with Mortensen, meanwhile, has been consistently volatile. Even before the birth of their son in March 2024, cheating rumors, followed by admissions of infidelity, followed by arguments that turned into phone sex (or sex sex), have dogged every season of Mormon Wives, most dramatically the most recent one, which filmed in the weeks before Paul left to film The Bachelorette. After lamenting her “unhealthy” co-parenting dynamic with Mortensen, Paul finds out that he has slept with someone else, which both infuriates her and turns her on; shortly thereafter on a cast trip to L.A., she and Mortensen are discovered naked in bed. The next day, the two discuss their “toxic cycle,” which Paul likens to an addictive drug. “I’m sitting here with you because this is what we think we deserve,” a tearful Paul tells him. “This is as good as it gets for us.” Reflecting on it with the resignation of knowing she will be tied to him as a co-parent for the rest of her life, Paul told me, “We both have that same wound of not feeling enough, not deserving. When you have that, you settle for disrespect.”
Paul with one of her suitors in the premiere episode of The Bachelorette. On March 19, ABC announced it had “made the decision to not move forward with the new season of The Bachelorette at this time.”
Photo: Bahareh Ritter/Disney
The cycle continues throughout the season. By the finale, Paul has discovered Mortensen has been seeing a woman in their social circle, and the morning she’s set to head off to the Bachelor mansion, Mortensen is filmed leaving her house. More dire, Paul’s period is late, and Mortensen claims they had sex while she was ovulating. The season ends on a cliffhanger, with Paul’s Mormon Wives co-star Jessi Draper asking the obvious question, “Is she gonna be a pregnant Bachelorette?”
Months later, it is clear to anyone who has seen her in person or on social media that Paul is not pregnant. If she had been, Paul told me she would have simply continued filming The Bachelorette. “I would have had my baby,” she said. “That would have been meant for a reason.”
At the time, she was sanguine about her relationship with Mortensen. “Did I love him? Absolutely,” Paul told me. “That goes without saying, but I think I’m to the point of just, like, resentment with him,” she said. “I think he loved me to his capacity, and it’s just not the type of love I want. I think love is calm, patient, kind, and wants the best for you no matter what, and that’s the love I want.”
Days after our second meeting in February, Draper City police opened an investigation of new domestic assault allegations made by both Paul and Mortensen. Filming for season five of Mormon Wives was, and remains, halted. Through a spokesperson, Paul told me, “I’ve been here before and I got through it and I’ve shared my story and my light, and I’m hoping I can do that again. I’m a person that will always speak my truth. That’s what I’m known for. So when the time is right, I will.” She added, “I believe that I am a good mother and I have always treated my kids very well.”
During a Good Morning America appearance on March 18, a visibly shaken Paul said of her future on Mormon Wives, “Hard to say now, with everything going on,” adding, “It’s like the end of the world. That’s what it feels like.” The appearance was intended to promote The Bachelorette. By the next day, that, too, would be canceled.
For its entire four-season reign, Mormon Wives’s most common (and most parodied) refrain was “Can MomTok survive this?” The question now might be: “Will The Bachelorette?” What was once a television show designed to emulate old-fashioned courting rituals and known for casting relatable Everywomen hired a professional influencer and famously divisive reality-TV star, thereby breaking its most sacred rule: that all contestants must be “here for the right reasons.” More traditional Bachelor Nation fans annoyed by the influencer-ification of reality TV already considered Paul the death knell for the franchise even before the recent scandal. From the very beginning, ABC was making a big bet on a figure whose defining, and perhaps most relatable, quality is her impulse to burn it all down. “It’s always a concern of how people are going to react to all those things. But I think when you look at what is going to make the most interesting story to tell, she is one of those more interesting stories,” Scott Teti, the showrunner for The Bachelorette, told me a week before the scheduled premiere. Teti said when he watched the first season of Mormon Wives, “I realized, Oh my God, this girl is one of the most honest reality-TV stars that I’ve ever seen. As we talked more, I realized she has no ability to really lie. Everything is really authentic; all the truth just comes out.”
Reports recently circulated that Paul and Mortensen both accused each other of physical violence during the season-three Mormon Wives reunion filmed last fall, but that the segment was edited out of the final cut. A source close to Bachelorette production maintains, however, that it is “highly unlikely” that Bachelorette producers would have known about this exchange in advance of filming her season (though Paul’s previous aggravated-assault charge was already public).
Casting Paul was an attempt at synergy by Disney: Mormon Wives has squeezed several seasons’ worth of drama from two cast trips to the hotel in Vanderpump Villa, another Hulu reality series, while two of the wives competed on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars in the fall. At the center of the conglomerate’s new realityverse is Paul, without whom none of it would have happened, and who seems to have the entire future of the Bachelor/ette franchise weighing on her star power. “Entire Bachelor Franchise ‘Could Be CANCELED’ If Bachelorette Taylor Frankie Paul Doesn’t ‘Save Embarrassing Ratings,’ blared one tabloid headline; indeed, viewership has been down across Bachelor Nation, in particular the most recent season of The Golden Bachelor, which critics panned as “boring.”
Paul in season four of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Photo: Disney
The hope seemed to be that Paul, with her knack for creating riveting reality television, would help save the show from irrelevance. Paul received unprecedented freedom to operate outside The Bachelor’s traditional format, in which the star gives a rose to the contestants they wish to continue dating. At one moment teased in the trailer, Paul seemed to kick out one of her suitors well before a rose ceremony. Elsewhere in the season, Teti hinted that Paul took back at least one rose she’d already handed out. “We let her make her own decisions in a way that affected the format, and sometimes that was a little scary because it was ‘You want to do what?’” he said. “It gives producers heart attacks, but also it’s very exhilarating because you don’t usually give talent that freedom to do those things … There are moments that are just like, Oh my God, what has she done?” Paul was also the first Bachelorette to have her phone and post behind-the-scenes content. Among the suitors vying for her affection were Brad Ledford, who was the driver in the car accident that paralyzed former congressman Madison Cawthorn; Another, Clayton Johnson, was formerly engaged to Lana Del Rey. Then there’s Doug Mason, a lifeguard from San Diego who looks like the platonic ideal of a lifeguard from San Diego and who also resembled Mortensen so much fans had already decided Paul chose him. (Tabloids, meanwhile, recently published photos of Paul and one of her Bachelorette contestants in Los Angeles — to some, the season was already spoiled before its cancellation.)
The schedule for shooting both series seemed to be getting to Paul. “I feel like I was more healthy in The Bachelorette because it was like I wasn’t in survival mode. And I’m in survival mode at home,” she told me. She recalled a time after returning back to Utah when she was so overstimulated by the responsibilities of filming while raising three children that she had to lie on the floor and dissociate. Her only break between production on Mormon Wives season four in the early fall, The Bachelorette from October to December, and Mormon Wives season five in January and February was the Christmas holiday. “I’m overwhelmed to the point that I feel suffocated. The emotional toll, it catches up to you, and I think I’ve been go-go-go that I have not processed shit that actually hurts,” she said.
She’d posted several times about the dark place she’d been in since returning to Utah, which she blamed at least in part on seasonal affective disorder, and told me she felt like she’d blocked out the past several months. In February, she cut around 60 percent of her press obligations. “I had a mental breakdown the other day on-camera, and it was just like, ‘Well, we have to be here. We’re contracted’ — no. This is not acting. I’m having a mental breakdown. I’m going home. That’s it, period,” she said of a recent scene filmed for season five. When I asked if there were ever a time she’d consider taking a step back from television or quitting it altogether, she replied, “Right now has been the closest I’ve ever gotten.”
But, she added with some resolve, “I’m not really a quitter.” As a child growing up in Colorado, Paul was sometimes too curious for her own good. “We have a lot of rules in our religion, and there’s nothing more motivating than someone telling me I can’t do something. Because I am going to,” she said. “Not out of spite, more out of curiosity. But curiosity can also hurt you.” Paul met her now-deceased biological father just once at the age of 4; she was raised Mormon by her mother, Liann, and stepfather, Jeremy May, whom Paul refers to as her dad. Though she told me she had a happy childhood, her parents’ philosophy was “rub some dirt in it, you’re gonna be fine,” she joked. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t really learn to navigate my emotions until now, and I’m doing it in front of a lot of people.” Her parents, along with Paul’s half-siblings, Hunter and Aspen, appear regularly on Mormon Wives, sometimes doubling as Paul’s adversaries: At one barbecue from season two, both parents criticize Paul for sleeping with Mortensen too early in their relationship. “You guys started your relationship on a foundation of shit,” Jeremy says in the scene, which ends with Paul in tears referring to her former self as “trash.”
Two habits kept her grounded. The first is her devotion to oversharing. “My therapist said, ‘I think the most you have ever let out is on a camera, and that’s your outlet,’” she said. “When I’m on my phone, I’m thinking, Let it out. It just feels so much better after the fact.” The second is her devotion to God. She has prayed almost every night since she was a little girl and told me her faith is one thing in her life that’s never wavered. The day she left to film The Bachelorette, she prayed in her car and asked God if she was really supposed to do this. Then, in the drive-through of a restaurant, someone had written on her cup, “Jesus is with you. Good luck at The Bachelorette.” “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’” she said. “That’s my sign to go.’”
The snow in Salt Lake City had subsided, and it was clear and cold as we headed to the photo shoot at a studio around the corner. As the camera flashed, the version of Paul I met in Vegas was back. After directing the photo team to play Beyoncé’s “Diva,” she’d fluffed the billowing cascade of brown hair behind her and announced with her signature mischievous bravado, “I’m trying to make it look crazy.”
Production Credits
Photograph by
Michael Friberg
Styling by
Krystine Couch
Hair by
Dominick Johnson
Makeup by
Peyton Warr
Shirt by
GAP
Boots by
Tecovas
Hat by
Zandria
Jewelry by
Charlie Lapson
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