I don’t even know how to ease into this news, so I’m just going to come out and say it: Taylor Frankie Paul is going to be the next Bachelorette. Paul came to reality TV by way of TikTok and a Mormon swinging scandal, whose fallout included the end of her marriage and the launch of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Hulu’s reality show about her friend group. The first two seasons chronicled the drama of Paul’s new, postdivorce relationship, and now that that has ended, we can all tune in as she resumes her search for true love.
Paul was announced as the upcoming lead of The Bachelorette on Wednesday morning in a new episode of Call Her Daddy. Speaking to host Alex Cooper, Paul said taking on the role feels surreal and that it still hasn’t really hit her. “It’s not real — and it’s not going to be until, I think, the limo is pulling up,” she said.
A little catch-up if you’re not yet familiar with Paul’s whole deal: She stars in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Hulu’s reality series that follows the lives of a group of Mormon “MomTok” influencers who burst into the public eye in May 2022, when Paul told her 3.5 million followers that she was getting divorced after “soft swinging” with her fellow MomTokers and their husbands. Paul and her then-husband, Tate Paul — with whom she shares two children, Indy and Ocean — apparently split up after she violated the group’s soft-swapping policies and went “all the way” with someone else’s husband.
Before the show began filming, Paul started dating a new guy, Dakota Mortensen. About six months into their relationship, Paul was arrested and charged with assault, domestic violence, and child abuse in February 2023 after drunkenly throwing metal chairs and a wooden play set at Mortensen, one of which hit her 5-year-old daughter. (She later described the incident in a TikTok video as her “hitting rock bottom,” and she said she felt “guilt, shameful, and embarrassed” and that it “made me seek help that I wasn’t getting at the time.”) Paul took a plea deal in September 2023, and that same month she announced that she and Mortensen were having a baby together. Throughout the show’s first season, the two navigated their on-and-off relationship. They have since split up for real.
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Anyway, that’s your next Bachelorette. It’s a major departure for the franchise, which typically picks leads from the previous season of The Bachelor with showrunners selecting one of the heartbroken fan-favorite contestants to wear the crown. Paul is the first Bachelorette to come from outside the show.
According to Paul, the contestants on her season don’t all have to be Mormon — she told Cooper she does “preferably want someone that does believe in God, because when you’re raising children, it can be confusing when one does and one doesn’t.” But also, she’s “up for hearing their side of it.” Still, something tells me they’ll save some money on the Champagne budget this season.
Paul’s Bachelorette reveal comes seven months after Deadline revealed that The Bachelorette would be skipping a cycle after its last season ended in disaster — its lead, Jenn Tran, was ghosted by her fiancé after proposing to him and was still made to watch the proposal in front of a live studio audience while sitting next to her ex. Fans expected to see another season of The Bachelor before The Bachelorette returned, but it seems as though the franchise got a compelling enough candidate to change course. It’s certainly a choice, but you bet I’ll be tuning in. How could I not?
