EVERYTHING'S COMING UP ROSES

You've never seen a Bachelorette like her before! Taylor Frankie Paul is doing things on her own terms this season — good luck not getting sucked in

- SARAH HEARON

Taylor Frankie Paul is changing the reality-TV game — again. For more than two decades, The Bachelorette has sold viewers a fairy tale with one nonnegotiable: contestants must be here for the right reasons. For the franchise’s latest lead, producers picked a woman who has exactly the kind of résumé that would have once made her a very unlikely choice — which is absolutely fine with her.

Paul, 31, has more than 7 million followers across her social media platforms. Her 2022 divorce from ex-husband Tate Paul (the father of her daughter, Indy, 8, and son Ocean, 5) exploded amid a viral “soft-swinging” scandal involving other couples in her close-knit Mormon community, catapulting MomTok — her community of Utah content creators — into the national spotlight. In 2023, she was arrested for assault and other charges stemming from a fight with then-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen. And unfinished business back home? The teaser for the upcoming fourth season of her ensemble reality show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, shows Paul in bed with Mortensen — the father of her youngest son, Ever, 2 — just weeks before she left for The Bachelorette.

Paul knows that viewers will question her motivation for joining the show, on which 22 single men vie for her heart. “I don’t really care,” she tells Us in her first interview about the season since production wrapped. “I didn’t have to do this... There was no other reason for me to do this other than I wanted to get outside of Utah and the toxicity that I’m in and venture off and really do something for myself.”