It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone, least of all the executives at The Walt Disney Company, that Taylor Frankie Paul was troubled.
With five minutes to go in the “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” pilot, we hear audio from a 911 call reporting domestic violence and a woman screaming as she tries to get out of a garage. Seconds later, we cut to a bodycam video of Taylor, drunk, trembling, and barely coherent as she’s arrested. She says boyfriend Dakota Mortensen “threw [her] out in the garage” and “pushed [her] into a wooden thing,” while he tells officers he was a “little bit scared for [his] life.”
Articles from 2023, widely reshared when “Secret Lives” premiered in September 2024, report that a video Dakota took of the incident showed Taylor “kicking him, putting him in a chokehold and hitting him with a barstool,” and that another barstool she threw hit her (then) 5-year-old daughter.
By the time Taylor was arrested, the pilot, minus those last five minutes, had been filmed. Her arrest put the show on hold. In August 2023, she entered a plea in abeyance to a third-degree felony count of aggravated assault; all other charges were dismissed with prejudice.
Hulu ultimately greenlit “Secret Lives,” which restarted filming in January 2024. It became the streamer’s most-watched unscripted premiere of 2024, and subsequent seasons racked up millions of views. The cast got opportunity after opportunity: Mayci Neeley wrote a book, Jen Affleck was cast on “Dancing With the Stars,” as was Whitney Leavitt, who went on to book “Chicago” and a Lifetime romantic comedy. And Taylor was tapped for the next season of “The Bachelorette,” Disney’s answer to a flagging franchise.
While Season 5 was filming, Dakota filed a restraining order against Taylor, alleging that she tried to strangle him with a necklace in February. (Hulu executives are reported to have witnessed discussions of domestic violence during filming and paused production in response to Dakota’s filing.) Sources previously told People that “allegations have been made in both directions” in the incident. (A third incident from 2024 is apparently now under investigation as well.) Around the same time, TMZ reported that Dakota was showing a copy of the 2023 video to friends.
A few days later, just 72 hours before “The Bachelorette” was set to air, TMZ published the 2023 footage. The backlash was swift. Just hours after the video went wide, Disney said it would not air the season “at this time,” but sources told The New York Times that Warner Bros. producers will finish editing the episodes they hadn’t yet handed over. If the cancellation stands, it could reportedly cost the network $70 million.
Public opinion has cleaved along two axis: Whether Taylor or Dakota is the abuser in their relationship, and where TMZ got the footage. There’s the contingent that is certain she’s the abusive one, and should be deplatformed and disappeared from the public eye. There’s the contingent that believes Taylor’s violence was a reaction to Dakota’s psychological torment. Some think TMZ obtained the video from law enforcement or Utah courts, others that Dakota sold it to them to derail “The Bachelorette.” Regardless of the stance, everyone seems very certain that they know exactly what’s going on.
I’m less certain. I’ll be the first to admit that I have my biases. But I don’t actually know anything. A three-minute video depicts what happened in those three minutes, not the total dynamic of a relationship. Everything I think I know about Dakota and Taylor’s dynamic is filtered through an edit, shaped by production choices I will never be privy to.
Here’s what I do know: Taylor and Dakota got together a few months after Taylor’s divorce and Dakota entered recovery for addiction to oxycodone, heroin, and fentanyl. Dakota lied to Taylor about being physically involved with another woman at the start of their relationship, doctoring his texts as proof and only coming clean when the other woman did. Dakota has pushed Taylor to marry him, but she’s consistently refused. Dakota has repeatedly gotten involved with women in proximity to Taylor when they’re off-again (a family friend, a “Vanderpump Villa” cast member during a crossover Hulu trip that will air in a few weeks, a MomTok member’s close friend, and a reunion with the woman he initially lied to her about), all while telling Taylor he loves her and wants her back. When Taylor finds out about these encounters, she becomes enraged at not just him but also the woman and anyone who knew and didn’t tell her quickly enough. She’s also insinuated that she gets “turned on” by hearing about his dalliances, and they always seem to end up back in bed together. It’s an ouroboros of toxicity that’s painful to watch.
Then there’s the Mormon factor. Both were raised in a theocracy that teaches that a woman’s place is in the home and the bedroom, servicing and supporting her husband. Only men can hold the “priesthood,” a term for the authority of God that is given to humans. To reach the highest level of Mormon heaven, a woman must be “sealed” to a man in a Latter-day Saint temple. There is supposed to be no sex before marriage. Appearance, and the appearance of virtue, are everything. It’s better for a Mormon woman to be stuck in an unhappy marriage than be a single mother. To be a Mormon woman is to exist in a state of permaviolence, raised in an environment that says you will always be less person than your male partner, to whom you should always (in Taylor’s brother’s words) “give an inch so he could walk a mile.”
As for Dakota, there’s a reason unattached addicts are told not to enter romantic relationships in their first year of recovery. It’s too easy to replace one addiction with another, and the potential ups and downs can derail addicts during a crucial time.
The show itself has made this already volatile coupling even more chaotic. The line between exploitation and drama has always been blurry in reality, but forcing two exes with a history of violence into proximity over and over again is on a different level. “Secret Lives” is hardly hurting for drama. There’s plenty of interpersonal conflict in the group and individual storylines to follow: Jessi and Mikayla’s crumbling marriages, Layla’s eating disorder struggles, Whitney and Jen adapting to newfound levels of fame. There’s no reason to film Dakota — who is not part of the cast — outside of his direct dealings with Taylor, other than to rile her up.
But even after they break up, members of DadTok insist on including him in filmed event after filmed event, cast trip after cast trip, which production has to sign off on. A production source told TMZ that during the Season 3 reunion, both Taylor and Dakota accused each other of physical abuse, claims that were kept out of the final edit. In Season 4, Hulu goes so far as to invite Dakota on a “Vanderpump Villa” crossover, where he sleeps with a cast member in an episode that will air soon, setting off another major fight between Taylor and Dakota.
Against this backdrop, Disney chose to cast her as “The Bachelorette” anyway.
The question of whether to platform Taylor was asked and answered back in 2024. On the one hand, Taylor is a reality-television supernova, airing all the gory details of of her life, all id, all the time — exactly what you want from a reality star. On the other, the police report from 2023 clearly stated that Taylor threw stools at Dakota and her daughter, and that her daughter had a “goose-egg” injury. The video is terrible, made worse by the fact that Taylor made her child collateral damage in her relationship. It also depicts exactly what the police report described, information that Hulu executives surely had when they greenlit “Secret Lives.” I’m not sure what they thought would happen after four more seasons of plumbing Taylor and Dakota’s relationship for as much drama as possible.
Taylor is responsible for her own choices, for the harm she did to her daughter and Dakota. She is hardly powerless in this situation, and should use this moment to reflect and seek help. But she never had the power to cast herself in a show, greenlight it, use bodycam footage of her arrest as the pilot cliffhanger, order three more seasons, integrate her ex into the cast, then cast herself in a second show built on the fantasy of a fairytale happy ending. Only the executives at Hulu, ABC, and Disney do. Now they’re paying for their lapse in judgment.