When video leaked last week of the reality television personality Taylor Frankie Paul throwing chairs at her boyfriend in a fit of rage, it was the sound of her child’s cry that most concerned observers.
Ms. Paul was, by her own account, “blacked out” from alcohol for most of that night in 2023 and overflowing with grief and anger over a raft of personal issues. In the video, which was published last week by TMZ, Ms. Paul is seen putting her partner at the time, Dakota Mortensen, into a headlock, kicking him and throwing two metal bar stools at him.
Mr. Mortensen warns her that her 5-year-old daughter is nearby on the couch, but she throws a third stool. Exactly where it lands is obscured by the chaos of the footage, but the child begins to wail.
“Your daughter just got hit in the head with a metal chair!” Mr. Mortensen yells at Ms. Paul.
“Because of you!” she screams back.
“No, you! Go and help your daughter!”
The emergence of the video quickly sunk Ms. Paul’s star turn on “The Bachelorette,” which Disney’s ABC shelved last week only days before its scheduled premiere. The wrenching response of the child in the video was a decisive factor in the conversations between executives, said a person familiar with their decision-making who was not authorized to speak publicly.
It is far from the first time that, amid an ongoing public controversy, new video evidence inflamed public opinion and caused an institution to rapidly change course.
“Reading about something and seeing something is just a fundamentally different emotional experience,” said Emma Gray, a journalist who co-hosts a podcast about reality television, “and watching that video was just very, very visceral.”
ABC was aware of the altercation when the network agreed to cast her, and even before the video’s release, the child’s presence had been well documented. Ms. Paul was arrested that night and faced charges that included domestic violence in the presence of a child. Months later, she reached an agreement with prosecutors in which she pleaded guilty to the aggravated assault of Mr. Mortensen. The other charges — including one misdemeanor count of child abuse — were dismissed.
Footage of the arrest was central to the first episode of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the series that put Ms. Paul on the reality television map. Ms. Paul has discussed the criminal case extensively in interviews, describing it as a catalyst for getting the mental health treatment she needed. As for how she spoke about the harm done to her daughter that night, Ms. Paul has vacillated between sounding remorseful and defensive, as in a confessional interview in Season 2 of “Mormon Wives”:
Publicly available documents and video — including podcasts and police body camera footage released in response to a records request — paint a fuller picture of how Ms. Paul’s daughter was caught in the middle of her mother’s violent episode, and how the reality star grappled with the stain on her reputation as she became a bankable public persona.
“That was one of my lowest nights on freakin’ TV, and it’s embarrassing,” Ms. Paul said in September on an episode of the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” which served as the announcement of her casting on “The Bachelorette.” “But with that has come a lot of learning lessons, and I’ve become a better mom because of it.”
Ms. Paul, 31, is now facing deepening legal troubles after Mr. Mortensen, with whom she shares a 2-year-old son, accused her in recent weeks of other instances of domestic violence, prompting investigations in two Utah police departments. But it was the new evidence about the years-old encounter that scuttled her season of “The Bachelorette.”
When Ms. Paul has made public statements recounting that night — Feb. 17, 2023 — she explains that she had been struggling emotionally after a series of personal challenges, including a divorce the previous year and a recent ectopic pregnancy. Earlier, she has said, she had been drinking at a friend’s party, and descended into sadness, then anger. When Mr. Mortensen drove her home from the party, they bickered about her drinking, and the argument grew in intensity back home, he said, after he told her she shouldn’t go to another location that night.
Mr. Mortensen told police that he tried to shove her out of his way in an attempt to leave amid the argument. She threw objects at him in the garage, jumped on his truck and struck him, he told police. He explained that the argument escalated inside the house, and she began throwing the chairs, one of which struck his arm before hitting the child:
Just before 11 p.m. that night, a neighbor had called 911 and reported hearing screaming across the street. During an interview with an officer from the Herriman Police Department in Utah, Ms. Paul said she had lashed out in reaction to Mr. Mortensen having pushed her. When the officer told her she was being arrested under suspicion of domestic violence, she appeared shocked:
In a police report, an officer noted scratches on Mr. Mortensen’s fingers, a minor laceration on his neck and his reporting pain around his elbow.
The child was not initially examined by any authorities, but after leaving the scene, the investigating officer watched the video of the attack. In the middle of the night, he called Ms. Paul’s mother, who had reached the scene not long after police arrived to take care of her two grandchildren. The officer asked Ms. Paul’s mother to check for any signs of injury on her granddaughter, and she told him that she did not see any.
About a week later, a detective checked in with the girl’s father, Ms. Paul’s former husband, who said he had noticed a “little bump” on his daughter’s head.
The police referred the case to Utah’s division of child and family services, and a caseworker filed a report, which is not public. A spokesman for the division declined to comment.
Ms. Paul has said she was not allowed to see her daughter for about a month after the arrest. So when officers visited her home about a week after the encounter, she appeared to learn for the first time that her daughter had, in fact, showed signs of a minor injury.
In her exchange with the officers, Ms. Paul suggested that she thought the video taken of the assault, which Mr. Mortensen had handed over to police, would make clear that she had no intention of hurting her daughter:
The same video published by TMZ was turned over to The New York Times in response to a police records request. An officer encouraged Mr. Mortensen to give the footage to the police, saying it could help protect him against Ms. Paul’s account that she had been responding to his aggression that night.
In the wake of the ordeal, which quickly attracted media attention, Ms. Paul described it as a wake-up call. She started therapy and anti-anxiety medication, and, per the recommendation of a court-assigned mental health evaluator, took courses on parenting and the effect that alcohol use can have on people’s lives.
Her plea agreement with prosecutors included three years of probation, with the possibility of getting her felony assault charge downgraded to a misdemeanor if she followed all of the court’s conditions, which included not drinking alcohol or violating any laws.
In podcasts following the plea agreement, she took accountability for the altercation, describing herself as having been the “aggressor” and saying that Mr. Mortensen had just been trying to defend himself. Her descriptions of whether the chair actually hit her daughter or not varied. In an interview with Nick Viall, the pop culture podcaster and former star of “The Bachelor,” in 2024 — right around the time “Mormon Wives” first premiered — she presented it as an open question:
Over the next year, Ms. Paul’s profile rose rapidly. Once a small-time social media influencer, she became an A-list reality TV talent capable of landing deals with the likes of Ulta and Taco Bell.
The clearest proof that the entertainment industry was taking her seriously came in September of last year, when she was named the next “Bachelorette.” In the podcast episode announcing the role, she described the arrest as an ordeal that was behind her, and denied hurting her daughter:
To ABC executives, it was an unfortunate part of her past, but one that had been dealt with head-on. Ms. Paul had faced the justice system, and the child abuse charge had been dismissed along with the domestic violence counts, a fact that reassured executives, said the person familiar with the show’s decision-making process.
News later emerged of another altercation between Ms. Paul and Mr. Mortensen last month, and “Mormon Wives” paused filming its fifth season.
At first, ABC stood by their “Bachelorette.” Until that video.
“A video acts as a catalyst for action unlike anything I have ever seen,” said Mark Geragos, a criminal defense lawyer who often deals with cases in the entertainment industry.
Mr. Geragos noted that the video’s release raised the question of whether television producers associated with “The Bachelorette” or “Mormon Wives” knew that the video existed, and if so, whether they had the responsibility to seek it out to see it for themselves before making Ms. Paul their star.
For many reality TV fans and commentators, the video forever changed how they viewed Ms. Paul and her show.
“The bottom line was the second the kid was there and got hit with the chair, and you didn’t run to protect your daughter from what you did — sorry, you lose all points with me,” said Steve Carbone, a reality TV podcaster known as Reality Steve, in an episode last week.
Other fans felt confident that the full story of Ms. Paul’s tumultuous relationship with Mr. Mortensen was more complicated than they knew, with some pointing to a statement from her public relations team that alluded to plans to air her own grievances. A spokesperson for Ms. Paul said last week that “she is currently exploring all of her options, seeking support, and preparing to own and share her story.”
The “Mormon Wives” fandom is accustomed to seeing a toxic cycle of conflict between the on-and-off couple, said Claire Fallon, who co-hosts the reality TV podcast “Love to See It” along with Ms. Gray. But the new video, and the role the child played in it, crossed into much darker territory. The captivating bubble of onscreen drama had been popped.
“Once a child is really brought into that and is being harmed in front of our eyes,” she said, “that is much harder to rationalize.”
Ms. Paul has yet to make another major statement about her legal troubles, which threaten the plea agreement she reached in 2023 with prosecutors. But fans have noticed her gradually returning to comments sections on social media. In one comment this week on a TikTok video addressing the controversy, Ms. Paul suggested that the video’s release would not help her daughter, who is now 8 years old.
“Worst part,” she wrote, “is my daughter having to relive and see it all over again years later after extensive work with her and apologies to her about that night.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.
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