• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 23, 2026

Frankie Taylor Paul went from flying high on Sunday to crashing on Thursday.

The Sunday was Oscar Sunday and Paul, a reality star from “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” on Hulu, was invited by ABC to walk the Red Carpet just like a movie star to promote the upcoming premiere a week later of the 22nd season of “The Bachelorette” on ABC, in which Paul, 31, had the title role.

Then last Thursday, just four days after the Oscars and three days before “The Bachelorette” season was set to premiere this past Sunday, the entire season of shows was scrapped after a 2023 video came to light in which Paul is seen allegedly assaulting her then-boyfriend as one of her small children wails in the background.

In the video, Paul screams, kicks, punches and pulls the hair of boyfriend Dakota Mortensen and throws a chair at him as Mortensen somehow manages to record a portion of the chaos on his cellphone. Some reports even said the child may have been injured in the melee.

After the video was made public by TMZ last week, going ahead with airing “The Bachelorette” with Paul as the show’s central figure became untenable.

As a result, ABC took the unusual, but not unprecedented step of trashing an entire season of a TV show before any of it had even aired. 

Giving Paul the starring role in a new season of “The Bachelorette” was a cross-promotion play aimed at boosting both “The Bachelorette” on ABC and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” on co-owned Hulu. 

“Mormon Wives” is said to be one of Hulu’s most-watched and most-talked about shows. And “The Bachelorette” has been a long-running staple of ABC since 2003.

In fact, the fourth season of “Mormon Wives” just started earlier this month on March 12, which means that Paul was poised to achieve a whole new level of reality-TV stardom this month.

“Mormon Wives” has been renewed for a fifth season, but production on that season has reportedly been paused in the wake of the Paul scandal.

The history of reality TV is littered with shows and personalities gone awry in a variety of ways.

Many of the incidents seem to stem from incomplete or poorly performed background checks. 

Just two years ago, in 2024, for example, the winning bachelor on “The Bachelorette,” Devin Strader, was reportedly later found to have had a restraining order filed against him by an ex-girlfriend, unbeknownst to the show’s producers.

In other shows such as “The Bachelor” on ABC and “Big Brother” on CBS, some participants were discovered after the shows were under way to have had questionable, racist pasts -- aspects of their backgrounds that were apparently not caught in the vetting process, if any.

But perhaps the most notorious sudden cancellation of a reality series of the last 15 years happened in 2014 to “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” after it came to light that June Thompson -- mother of Honey Boo Boo (aka Alana Thompson) and known as Mama June on the show -- was dating a convicted sex offender.

For a time from 2012 to 2014, nine-year-old Honey Boo Boo was the most talked-about child in America. 

Her reality show ran for four seasons and became one of the most widely watched shows in the history of TLC.

But when the news of Mama June’s boyfriend came out, TLC wasted no time in cancelling the show when, like “The Bachelorette,” a complete new season was in the can and ready to go.

Where the Frankie Taylor Paul story is concerned, anyone who expended a little effort to perform a background check on her would have had no problem learning about her past incidents of domestic violence.

Had ABC made such a check, the network may have avoided the costly calamity of axing an entire season of “The Bachelorette” just three days before its premiere date.