The Disney Princess Who Wasn’t

Taylor Frankie Paul’s turn on The Bachelorette was meant to be a fairy tale fit for reality, an age-old love story made modern by a heroine who had risen to fame as an antihero. Frankie Paul first gained notoriety as an online influencer and came to ABC’s soft-lit dating show through her role on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where—as a reliable purveyor of high-stakes melodramas and telegenic tantrums—she has helped make the Hulu series a hit. In the topsy-turvy world of unscripted shows, toxicity is often currency, and bad behavior is practically a contractual obligation. And here, Frankie Paul delivered.

A Mormon wife who wasn’t (the mother of three is a divorcée, and the person almost single-handedly responsible for bringing soft swinger into the American pop-cultural lexicon), she rose through reality’s ranks in part because she proved so uniquely adept at the art of self-exploitation. She was cast as the Bachelorette both despite her history and because of it. She also landed the gig because the ABC show and Hulu, the distributor of Mormon Wives, share the same corporate parent: Disney.

If reality shows are twists on fairy tales—stories with moral messages and bits of enchantment—ABC’s promotion of its new star was apt. Her participation in the dating show, the network implied, was its own kind of happy ending, and Frankie Paul her own kind of Disney princess, one fit for an era whose fantasies are shaped by reality TV.

But even the most tangled fairy tales, it turns out, have their breaking point. Yesterday, the gossip site TMZ posted a smartphone-shot video from 2023 showing Frankie Paul at home with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Dakota Mortensen and her then-5-year-old daughter. (Frankie Paul now also has a son with Mortensen; his conception, birth, and infancy have been season-spanning plot points on Mormon Wives.) In the video, the adults fight. Frankie Paul launches herself at Mortensen, pulls his hair, screams. She throws metal barstools toward him, and one—the video is shaky—seems to strike her daughter; the girl cries. “You’re done!” Mortensen shouts at Frankie Paul, and to an extent, he is correct: Soon after the video went public, ABC announced that her season of The Bachelorette, which had been scheduled to premiere this Sunday, would no longer be airing.

Frankie Paul, through a representative, responded to the video (allegedly leaked by Mortensen himself): “Releasing an old video, which conveniently omits context,” the representative told People, “is a reprehensible attempt to distract from his own behavior.” The star didn’t have many other options. The video may be grainy; it may be lacking in fuller context; it may be, in its own way, selectively edited. In the version published by TMZ, several portions suddenly go blank, leaving only audio evidence of the encounter. The reality that the recording does depict, however, is all too stark. No edit, and no spin, can counter the hard fact of a child in apparent pain.

The fairy tale Disney had written on Frankie Paul’s behalf alluded to her flaws; the video put them on display. The Bachelorette was an elaborate brand collaboration; the video effectively tarnished Frankie Paul’s brand.

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But Disney, too, has been sullied. ABC’s abrupt cancellation of Frankie Paul’s season belies the fact that the video’s revelations, overall, are not new. The footage was recorded during a fight that led Mortensen to file domestic-violence and other charges against Frankie Paul in February 2023. (She eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated assault; the domestic-violence charges were dismissed.) Mormon Wives’ producers managed to get cameras on the scene to capture its aftermath, and the footage that resulted, including Frankie Paul’s interactions with local police, became a Season 1 plot point. Violence, remade for public consumption, was one of the enticements producers offered to help propel the show, to attract a hungry audience. Mormon Wives’ wide viewership was one reason that Frankie Paul became the Bachelorette in the first place.

Traditional fairy tales generally employ a blunt moral calculus: The princess is who she is—pure, good, worthy—and is, in time, rewarded for it. Her path to happily ever after may require luck and patience and a bit of magic, but ultimately, her happy ending is deserved. The Bachelorette’s version of the story required calculation. The show, in casting Frankie Paul, was not merely elevating a princess; it was creating one.

Promotional materials for her season occasionally read as preemptive acts of crisis PR. A trailer featured Frankie Paul, remade as the Bachelorette, living the familiar clichés (limos, fireworks, sailboats!) of made-for-TV courtship. It also featured the men she dated on the show waxing eloquent about her qualities. “She’s what I look for in a wife,” one said. Another declared: “I know her, I trust her, and I love her.” The claims issued by these would-be princes doubled as testimonials. This Bachelorette, swept along on a high-speed redemption arc, was elevated rather than compromised by her flaws, her struggles recast as advertisements—promises of good TV.

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ABC effectively gave Frankie Paul a princess edit. She appeared at the Oscars last Sunday—another bit of brand cohesion with the ABC-aired ceremony—clad in a dress decorated with gossamer-like floral details: Cinderella in a red-carpet-ready glow-up. But the gown, featuring a series of cutouts, was notably not demure. This, too, served the edit: In marketing The Bachelorette, ABC has emphasized the star’s discordance in a franchise that, though campy, has been a self-conscious purveyor of moralism. “She’s an absolute wild card,” The Bachelorette’s host, Jesse Palmer, marveled about Frankie Paul in a promotional interview.

“Here for the right reasons” is a long-standing refrain on this particular dating show: a purity test regularly given to contestants who, having been plucked from obscurity to look for love on national television, are made to prove their worthiness for the honor. Yet Frankie Paul was not obscure—and could hardly have been called traditionally “pure.” She was a Bachelorette whose reputation preceded her, and the show turned her unfitness into a sales pitch. “She’s a really confident woman,” one of her ABC-selected suitors says about her in the promotional trailer. “She’s gentle and sweet”—he pauses, dramatically—“unless you piss her off.” Another suitor (quoted after a supercut compilation that finds Frankie Paul berating the men and requesting that they give back the roses she has just handed out) says that “this is the epitome of there being no rules at all.”

But fairy tales, for all their magic, do in the end have rules. In an upside-down way so appropriate for reality TV, Frankie Paul ended up proving that. Her well-publicized fairy tale has given way, for now, to an all-too-familiar kind of nightmare. The princess was not rescued by reality; she was done in by it.