ABC and Warner Horizon, the network and studio behind The Bachelor franchise, knew about Taylor Frankie Paul‘s guilty plea on a 2023 assault charge when they hired her to lead season 22 of The Bachelorette. The incident involving her ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen was, after all, a story point in the very first episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the Hulu reality show that brought Paul and her fellow “MomTok” influencers a much larger degree of fame than they previously had on social media.
The case initially carried charges of domestic violence in the presence of a child and misdemeanor child abuse, both of which were dropped in exchange for Paul’s guilty plea to aggravated assault. News reports from the time indicate that police saw video footage of the altercation and that it showed Paul’s then-5-year-old daughter was struck when she threw a metal chair at Mortensen.
But until Thursday, when TMZ published the video, ABC was going full steam ahead in promoting Paul and The Bachelorette. A preview of the season aired after the Oscars and drew more than 5 million viewers, a good sign for a show coming off both a long break and, before that, its two least watched seasons on record. It raises the question: Had the video not become public, would ABC and Warner Horizon have gone ahead with the season instead of shelving it?
The sad answer to that is probably yes. Even in the sometimes squalid world of reality TV, the Bachelor franchise seems more prone to unseemly revelations about the people involved in it than just about any other show. Yet the shows have done the TV equivalent of posting through it, making gestures of concern toward cleaning up their acts while cynically leveraging the drama surrounding the franchise’s small and large scandals to rev up interest and drive viewers to their screens.
But if it took a video of a child being injured to pull the show from TV, then the Bachelor franchise is beyond help. It’s time for it to go away.
The list of scandals around the franchise is long, both in front of and behind the camera. Several Bachelor in Paradise castmembers have been booted from the show after behavior ranging from overly aggressive drunkenness to alleged sexual misconduct. Bachelor and Bachelorette contestants have said, posted or liked racist and homophobic things. Long-time host Chris Harrison was dropped from the franchise after downplaying one of those incidents in an interview with Rachel Lindsay — the first Black Bachelorette. Inaugural Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner’s story was not nearly as warm and fuzzy as the show presented it.
After most of those incidents, ABC and Warners have vowed to do a better job vetting contestants and tightening up other procedures before cameras rolled and supporting their newly famous alumni afterward. Yet the same issues keep popping up, and network and studio each keep insisting the responsibility falls with the other to make things better.
Maybe that’s because things behind the scenes were reportedly toxic as well. The franchise itself has long been criticized for the lack of diversity in its cast (particularly among the leads). Series creator Mike Fleiss left the show in 2023, and shortly afterward it was revealed that he had been the subject of an HR investigation at Warner Bros. into allegations of bullying and racial discrimination. Two years later, his replacements as showrunners on The Bachelor, Claire Freeland and Bennett Graebner, left the franchise after allegations that they created a hostile workplace environment on the show.
The toxicity around the franchise has largely been played on screen as “shocking revelations,” to crib the show’s overwrought narrative language, helping fuel the content machine the Bachelor-verse has become. It is bone-deep at this point, and the constant ginning up of drama is no longer working. The two main shows in the franchise, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, have drawn their smallest audiences ever in the past couple of seasons.
And yes, network TV as a whole is declining — but it’s not hard to find success stories. Just within ABC’s unscripted lineup, Dancing With the Stars (which featured two of Paul’s Mormon Wives co-stars, Whitney Leavitt and Jen Affleck) had its best season in years in the fall. American Idol is up so far this season too. Paul’s casting and notoriety was seen as a chance for The Bachelorette to reverse its recent ratings slump and re-establish the show after the off-camera controversy derailed the planned 2025 edition of the show.
But again, ABC and Warners knew about Paul’s guilty plea and, presumably, all the details surrounding it long before the video became public Thursday, and long before filming, editing and promoting an entire season centered on her. Disney’s statement mentioned it would focus on “supporting [Paul’s] family,” which reads as hollow — all the moreso because a few words before that, the company said it wouldn’t air The Bachelorette “at this time,” suggesting there will be a time that the season sees the light of day.
The bloom is off the rose. ABC and the Bachelor franchise need a divorce.
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