Taylor Frankie Paul Broke The Bachelor

When Taylor Frankie Paul was first announced as the new Bachelorette, the fandom was divided. Paul’s role as a tumultuous star on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and a viral TikTok personality gave the franchise the relevance it has lacked for years. But there was wariness, too: As a lead of The Bachelor franchise, would Paul actually make the series feel fresh again? Or would all the drama she brought with her ruin the season entirely?

This week, in the aftermath of new domestic-violence allegations against Paul and the circulation of a video detailing events from a 2023 aggravated assault, the answer has become clear. ABC announced Thursday that it would pull Paul’s Bachelorette season. “In light of the newly released video just surfaced today, we have made the decision to not move forward with the new season,” a Disney Entertainment spokesperson announced. “Our focus is on supporting the family.” In an effort to draw in new viewers, The Bachelor franchise has instead ripped itself apart.

For the uninitiated, Paul’s recent TV timeline is the kind of mess reality producers dream about and dread at the same time. In season four of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which premiered on March 12, Paul ends her arc with what should be a big farewell moment to send her off for her Bachelorette production. Her castmates gather at the airport to say good-bye, but Paul is still at home freaking out, because the night before she once again slept with frequent on-again, off-again partner, Dakota Mortensen. The season ends not only with Paul unsure how to move forward with the Bachelorette, but questioning whether she may now be pregnant.

After the events of that finale, Paul filmed her season of The Bachelorette and then returned to her home in Utah to begin production on season five of Mormon Wives. But in February 2026, between filming that Bachelorette season and the planned release of the premiere episode this week on March 22, Paul and Mortensen engaged in another alleged physical altercation that led to a new ongoing domestic-violence investigation and Mormon Wives pausing production. That news broke on March 16. Then, on March 19, a video began to circulate of an incident from 2023, which at the time resulted in Paul being charged with and pleading guilty to aggravated assault against Mortensen. Although the 2023 assault was already public, the video was new. In the clip, filmed by Mortensen, Paul kicks Mortensen and hurls barstools at him; one of the stools seems to hit one of her children.

The Bachelor producers could have predicted that something like this might happen. But despite Paul’s extremely complicated past, there was ample motivation to cast her on The Bachelorette, a franchise that’s historically been known for twinkle lights and magical fairy-tale escapism. She would bring buzzy new attention to a show with declining viewership and further the cross-promotional synergy between Hulu’s reality programming and the older ABC reality stable. For Paul, The Bachelorette represented the next frontier in an imperialist impulse to conquer reality TV on multiple fronts, and its comparatively sweet brand identity represented a way to launder some of Paul’s unsavory history.

But The Bachelorette needed Paul even more than she needed it. While Mormon Wives has been a reality bonanza for the past several years, The Bachelor has slowly faded into an increasingly sleepy TV ghost town. The Bachelor has plenty of skeletons in the closet after years of its own scandals including racism, participants with criminal histories, and alleged sexual misconduct on Bachelor in Paradise. The idea that this series is now a shiny, mainstream-acceptable option illuminates how grim things had already become on Mormon Wives. The Bachelor ratings have slipped, and its stars are no longer well-known names; in contrast, personalities from Love Is Blind and Love Island take over social media whenever those shows return for a new season. The 2025 Bachelor, Grant Ellis, has a mere 158,000 Instagram followers. Mild-mannered and utterly uncontroversial Love Is Blind participant Christine Ham, whose season finished airing only weeks ago, has 202,000. (Taylor Frankie Paul: 2.4 million.) There has been tepid success with the recent attempt to spin off the new Golden Bachelor series, but for the most part, The Bachelor has lost the juice. And whatever else has been the case with Paul, she has a public spotlight that will follow her wherever else she appears on TV.

This is a new power dynamic for the Bachelor/ette model. In the past, the imprimatur of Bachelor branding was what made new reality stars into major personalities. It spawned Nick Viall, current king of reality podcasters; entertainment personality Rachel Lindsay; and Travis Stork, whose daytime show, The Doctors, ran for 14 years. Meanwhile, Paul’s Bachelorette role was set to become a situation where the tail wagged the dog; she would be the one in charge, not the franchise. But it never had a chance to get that far, because even before the new video began to circulate, Paul’s Mormon Wives story line and personal pitfalls outside of The Bachelorette undermined the entire premise of the series.

The Bachelor lives and dies on the promise that its lead is “there for the right reasons,” which is to find love. Yes, in the contemporary era, viewers understand that most of what’s happening onscreen is fake on some level — that there are manipulative producers, participants with ulterior motives, and editors who alter conversations into moments that seem quite different from whatever actually happened. But on The Bachelor, where host Jesse Palmer still has to stand in front of a building the show insists on calling a mansion while surrounded by red roses and limousines, there’s at least a gesture toward the possibility that maybe these people could fall in love. That lack of certainty is The Bachelor’s bread and butter. There needs to be a chance that what’s happening onscreen is connected to real emotion.

Paul started chipping away at that veneer when Hulu cameras documented her missing her flight to shoot The Bachelorette because she was with an ex. She was never going to be the humble, flawless, America’s-sweetheart figure long associated with Bachelor fame. Worse, she was obviously not going to appear on The Bachelorette with “an open heart,” as she swore was the case on Good Morning America this week. She has been in the headlines everywhere; she’s appeared in a “truer,” more “real” form on another reality show; and she has spent this week attempting and failing to do damage control. The Bachelorette was not going to become Paul’s shiny redemption arc. It was an empty vessel to let her stay on TV and speed-run through a couple dozen other men before appearing on an even more dramatic fifth season of Mormon Wives.

This will likely not be the end of The Bachelor as a series. If anything, whatever the show does next will now have even more eyeballs on it than before. But Paul’s abortive stint as a Bachelorette has shown the franchise has been eroded by an economy of reality influencers who are even more troubling and capable of capturing even more attention in a race to the bottom that cannot be reversed. The Bachelor as it used to be — an often disastrous, sometimes entertaining, regularly troubling series — has engineered its own irrelevance.