‘Bachelorette’ debacle highlights how we normalize domestic violence

A leaked video of reality star Taylor Frankie Paul throwing chairs at her boyfriend while her daughter wailed in the background was the death knell for the newest season of “The Bachelorette.”

On March 19, the same day that TMZ released the footage, executives at ABC decided to shelve the season just three days before the premiere. The network knew about the domestic violence accusations against Paul before she was cast as the next Bachelorette but had decided to proceed with filming.

In clips from the 2023 altercation, Paul is heard screaming while putting her boyfriend, Dakota Mortensen in a headlock, kicking him and throwing two metal bar stools at him. When she hurls a third stool across the room, her 5-year-old daughter, who is off camera, starts crying. Police later reported that the child was injured.

Someone with knowledge of the conversations that took place among ABC executives after the video surfaced said it was the “wrenching response of the child in the video” that became the deciding factor in pulling the season, according to a report in the New York Times.

It shouldn’t take a leaked video on TMZ to activate our moral conscience when someone is the victim of domestic violence. And it shouldn’t matter if the victim is female, male or a child.

We can’t know the full dynamics from one video — Paul or Mortensen might be the aggressor in their relationship — but we can use what we saw as an opportunity to explore what we think we know about domestic abuse.

Though perpetrators of domestic violence are overwhelmingly male, recent studies have indicated that men are increasingly victims and children are increasingly witnesses.

An estimated 30% of men in Georgia have experienced family violence but they face greater barriers than women in reporting abuse or finding support, according to data from the Georgia Commission on Family Violence.

In 2024, almost a third of reported family violence incidents in the state were committed with a child present.

When women are viewed as the aggressors, the standards we use to evaluate domestic violence feel different. We give grace to mothers even if children are placed in harm’s way, and we assume that men should be able to handle themselves.

Paul was the first Bachelorette from outside Bachelor Nation. She first gained attention on social media with MomTok videos, which later led to the Hulu reality series, “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” She now has as many followers on TikTok as Beyoncé, which presumably makes her a celebrity.

Taylor Frankie Paul arrives at the 58th Annual CMA Awards at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tenn., in 2024. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP 2024)

Perhaps for that reason, records of Paul’s arrest and charges, which included domestic violence in the presence of a minor, and her ultimate guilty plea to aggravated assault of Mortensen, weren’t enough to outweigh the possibility of a ratings boost for the lagging Bachelor franchise.

Paul said she was drunk, angry and grief stricken during the incident which a rational person might argue is not a valid defense for physically abusing another human.

It was hard to watch the video of Paul attacking Mortensen. I felt the same level of disgust as I did when video surfaced of NFL player Ray Rice knocking his girlfriend, now wife, unconscious in an elevator in 2014, or last year when I watched 2016 footage of Sean “Diddy” Combs kicking and dragging Cassie Ventura by her hair in a hotel hallway.

We think of domestic violence in terms of physical abuse, but according to domestic violence experts, family violence can look different when women are the aggressors. Women may use the element of surprise to make up for differences in strength, attacking men when they are asleep. They might wield knives or guns as threats, destroy property or turn common household objects into weapons by throwing them, as Paul did with metal chairs.

Domestic violence is a pattern of abusive behaviors designed to control the other person and that includes public or private humiliation, accusations of infidelity as a form of harassment or making false allegations to friends, family or authorities to manipulate and isolate the victim.

Abuse might also involve taking car keys to prevent the victim from leaving, defaulting on financial obligations or preventing the victim from seeing their children.

Though domestic violence against men may look different, men and women stay in abusive relationships for the same reasons — shame, religious beliefs, low self-esteem, limited resources, protecting children or outright denial.

Both Mortensen and Paul have filed additional claims of domestic violence against each other which are currently being investigated by two Utah police departments. During the investigations, filming for SLOMW has been paused ... again.

You can have drama and conflict on reality television without dabbling in domestic violence. It shouldn’t be something that is leveraged for entertainment value.

But when we prioritize, center and reward a person who engages in abusive behavior, we normalize that behavior, and that is a mistake, whether it happens in reality or on reality TV.