September 18, 2026:

Analysis: Fans expected the show, which long embraced controversy and difficult conversations, to address the disturbing allegations against Taylor Frankie Paul. Instead, it delivered a nothingburger.

When I began watching the fifth season of Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives last week, I was on edge. 

The hit reality show, which has released four other seasons since 2024, follows a cast of young Mormon mom-influencers—also known as MomTok—living in Utah. Taylor Frankie Paul, a hotheaded, 32-year-old mother of three, has been The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ (Mormon Wives) unofficial main character since Season 1, after she infamously revealed that she and her ex-husband had done “soft-swinging” with a few other couples.

Season 5 chronicles the aftermath of Paul filming her season of The Bachelorette, an ABC show that also streams on Hulu, from January to March 2026—a move that some fans and former contestants were excited about because Paul was the first Bachelorette lead who didn’t come from a previous season of The Bachelor. Her casting had the potential to revive a dying franchise.

And then, a video leaked. 

In March, just days before Paul’s season was set to premiere, the celebrity gossip site TMZ published a video from 2023 in which Paul can be seen pushing and kicking Dakota Mortensen, the father of her youngest child. In the most disturbing moment of the video, Paul throws a stool at Mortensen, and her daughter (whose father, Tate Paul, is not on the show), wails. 

The resulting criminal indictment said the child was hit by the stool. Paul ultimately pleaded down to one aggravated assault charge. As part of the deal, the rest of the charges, including one count of child abuse with injury, were dropped.

Paul reportedly does not have primary custody of any of her children.

Law enforcement opened two other investigations earlier this year after Mortensen contacted police about alleged domestic violence by Paul in 2024 and filed for a restraining order, and following an incident where both Mortensen and Paul accused each other of abuse in a February 2026 incident. 

In April, Paul was granted a temporary protective order against Mortensen, and the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office said it would not file additional charges against Paul related to the 2026 domestic violence investigations. Mortensen was also granted a temporary restraining order against Paul. 

After the 2023 video made headlines, ABC canceled Paul’s season of The Bachelorette. 

Mormon Wives had already paused production due to the February 2026 incident. (In 2023, Mormon Wives had an 11-month gap between Taylor’s arrest for domestic violence in the presence of a child, among other offenses, after the very incident depicted in the leaked video and the filming of Season 1’s second episode. Paul still returned to the show.) 

And just this week, one of Mormon Wives’ original cast members, Mikayla Matthews, announced she would no longer be filming the show. Matthews cited her own childhood abuse—which she’s discussed at length on-screen—and suggested that her departure in the middle of Season 6 is related to Paul’s possible return to the show.

“There’s no amount of money worth going against my morals … for me personally, continuing to directly profit from this behavior feels wrong and unethical,” Matthews wrote in an Instagram post. “It feels like a disservice to the children, everyone’s healing, and the millions of people watching.”

Variety reported that sources confirmed Paul will return for Season 6, though Hulu has not yet publicly commented on the matter.

Matthews announced on Sept. 17 that she would donate the money she would have made from the remainder of the season to the National Children’s Alliance, a nonprofit that provides training and assistance to create and improve Children’s Advocacy Centers. 

ABC was criticized for casting Paul as the Bachelorette when her domestic violence arrest had been documented on Mormon Wives’ very first episode. Mormon Wives, for its part, teed up the shortened, five-episode fifth season as a look into the fallout of the video leak. 

But the revelation that Paul will return to filming the show despite her documented history of abuse and toxic on-screen behavior makes it even more bewildering that Season 5 barely scratched the surface of her domestic violence case. 

‘Ultimately about entertainment’

Season 5 opens with a title card explaining that the cast filmed their talking-head interviews in May 2026, after a two-month production hiatus. The cast of very beautiful, very Botox-ed young mothers are visibly uncomfortable during their confessionals.

Each episode provides a timeline update counting down the time between when the upcoming scene was filmed and when production paused. Transitions between scenes show countless TikTok videos of social media creators live-updating viewers on cast news, from Paul’s Bachelorette stint to cast member Whitney Leavitt’s Broadway debut—and, finally, the pause. 

Spoiler alert: The season ends on a cliffhanger, with Paul calling her castmates to accuse Mortensen of calling Child Protective Services on her. The show promises the story is “to be continued.”

At first, I threw my hands up when I saw the abrupt season finale. Who cares about months of petty drama and insecurities among MomTok, when the audience is well-aware of the devastating cycle of abuse brimming behind the scenes? For a show that has at least attempted to handle serious, uncomfortable issues, like cast members’ sexual abuse, with care, the season was sloppy. 

In the second season, Matthews opened up to the Mormon Wives audience about her abuse and how it continues to affect her as an adult. She explained in talking-head interviews that she didn’t feel that her mother or siblings believed her, and the show documented her struggling with intimacy with her husband as a result. 

During the Season 2 reunion, Connor Leavitt, husband to MomTok member Whitney Leavitt, shared that he had been raped as a child, and he had reached out to Matthews to encourage her to seek therapy. 

This sort of exploration isn’t out of a reality show’s scope—in fact, “the genre has always been predicated on exploiting people’s trauma,” explained Dr. Brandy Monk-Payton, a media studies professor at Fordham University who teaches a course on the ethics of reality television. 

But instead of dedicating similar time and nuance to Paul’s domestic violence case, the shortened fifth season read as if producers wanted to string together a five-ish hour trailer for a sixth season that will, supposedly, give the audience what it actually wants: the inside scoop on how Paul reacted in the moment, what her castmates think, and where the show goes from here. The only resource provided was the National Domestic Violence Hotline number, slotted in at the very end of Episode 5. 

The producers’ handling of the season has turned the domestic violence cases into entertainment, which some have argued normalizes Paul’s behavior. And the news of Paul’s likely return has made some fans question why Mormon Wives might continue to give her a platform. 

But Monk-Taylor wasn’t surprised.

“Reality television is ultimately about entertainment, and it is a commercial enterprise,” Monk-Taylor said in an interview with Rewire News Group. “So as long as audiences are there and are willing to watch Taylor Frankie Paul’s antics, the production has no incentive to fire her. They’re in the business of making money and getting eyeballs on the screen, which they have done successfully.”

How reality TV handles abuse

Mormon Wives isn’t the first reality show to contend with allegations of abuse and violence by and against cast members—and Paul isn’t even the first Bachelor franchise lead to be accused of similar behavior. 

All seasons of Married At First Sight UK was yanked from the air after two cast members accused their on-screen husbands of rape, the BBC reported in May 2026.

And in 2020, Season 23 Bachelor winner Cassie Randolph was granted a temporary restraining order against Colton Underwood, the season’s lead and her ex-boyfriend, after accusing Underwood of stalking, harassment, and placing a tracking device in her car. Randolph later dropped the restraining order after the two reached “a private agreement.”

While the public widely condemned Underwood, ABC and the Bachelor franchise largely swept the accusations under the rug because the controversy occurred after the season ended. 

Monk-Payton noted that even though reality TV producers conduct background checks and can have mechanisms to ensure that the people they put on screen don’t have past legal cases, issues can arise because of how production is set up: There is time between filming versus when a show airs, and things that have happened in the past are not always recorded.

“There’s the question around: Is the evidence presented on the actual program? Maybe not. In a lot of ways, not,” Monk-Payton said. “So then, how do you adjudicate some of these situations where you’re retroactively trying to account for domestic violence or any other kinds of issues on on set, whether it be sexual assault, sexual harassment?”

The Bachelorette seems to be using the same playbook for Paul, but Mormon Wives can’t quite get away with it. Paul is an active cast member, and the show broadcast her 2023 arrest to the world (or, at least, to Hulu subscribers). What’s more, Hulu doesn’t seem to want to shy away from Paul’s controversy.

“As they sort of lean into the spectacle of you know Taylor Frankie Paul and her crises, if folks continue to watch, then … she’s not going to be reprimanded for that,” Monk-Payton said.

That may be because Paul’s fan base remains loyal. 

In some ways, she epitomizes what MomTok purports to stand for: Pushing against what a “good Mormon mother” should look like. Paul is messy and unafraid to discuss many of her shortcomings. 

And, as Monk-Payton pointed out, Paul presents a sort of authenticity that doesn’t seem to be for the cameras. 

“She has flaws, and people are attracted to women who have flaws,” Monk-Payton said. “She’s kind of an anti-heroine in that regard. And that’s captivating to watch on screen—even if it, you know, ultimately ends up being this incredibly volatile situation that leads to criminal charges.” 

But because of Paul’s massive social media following, her unaddressed domestic violence cases become an even bigger elephant in the room on-screen. 

“Given whenever it was sort of actually recorded versus time to broadcast, the network decided that this was something that they wanted to sweep under the rug, or to just kind of de-emphasize it,” Monk-Payton said. “And that’s hard when you have a cast member like Taylor Frankie Paul who is sort of always visible on social media and elsewhere. So we can’t escape that moment. It kind of haunts us as viewers.” 

What’s the point? 

The question that remains for me is: What can Mormon Wives do to address Paul’s controversy? And does it even matter? 

There isn’t a clean answer. Reality TV is, of course, grounded in creating entertainment out of people’s real lives, and the question of what duty the genre has to the public—and how it should serve the public good—has long existed, Monk-Payton said. 

“But reality television both reflects and refracts society,” she added.

Holding Paul to account on-screen may not be as obvious to producers as it is to audiences—many reality shows don’t break the fourth wall, and they’re often reticent to contend with their own flaws. Older shows like America’s Next Top Model and The Biggest Loser, which profited off humiliating cast members, Monk-Payton pointed out, have only recently begun to have a public reckoning.

“But that took years of reflection,” she added. “I think that Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is still so contemporary, so recent, that the desire to have them reflect on their production, it just might not be satisfied.”

Ultimately, Paul has an audience, and whether or not she cuts ties with the show, she has a platform. It will take more than just her removal from Mormon Wives to end the use of her domestic abuse as entertainment.

“It stops when we stop watching, and it stops when people decide to not appear on the show with Taylor Frankie Paul,” Monk-Payton said. “Or, it stops when Taylor Frankie Paul potentially gets help that she might need.”

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