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By now, you’ve probably heard that Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of The Bachelorette has been canceled by ABC.
Now, we’re receiving new information about the fateful night of her arrest.
Police bodycam footage shows Taylor’s victim, then-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen, asking police to arrest him instead.
That obviously didn’t happen, and new footage shows the rest of the incident and highlights the fact that police basically had no choice but to take Taylor into custody.
Police who responded to a neighbor’s call on the night of February 17, 2023 determined that Taylor was the “primary aggressor,” and she eventually pled guilty to assualt charges.
ABC cast her as The Bachelorette despite that history, and if video of Paul assaulting Mortensen had never surfaced, the network almost certainly would have aired her season in its entirety.
The video from the night of her arrest shows Taylor heavily intoxicated and highly upset.
At times, it’s difficult to make out what she’s saying. She admits to hitting Mortensen but also alleges that he “pushed” her.
In footage shot by Dakota, we saw Taylor hurling kitchen barstools at him, one of which allegedly struck her daughter, Indy, who was just 5 years old at the time.
“You can hear me trying to check on [Indy], but every time I tried to help her, I was getting attacked,” Mortensen tells officers in the bodycam footage. “So I couldn’t.”
Elsewhere in the footage, an officer asks Mortensen if Taylor urinated on herself, adding that it’s “very common” for domestic violence victims to “pee themselves.”
“If she peed herself, it’s because she was so intoxicated,” Mortensen explained.
Taylor’s parents also arrived on the scene and made their case to police, but to no avail.
“Is it super bad?” Paul asks the officers about her potential legal troubles as they inspect her damaged home in aftermath of the fight.
“Well, no one’s dead, so it’s not super bad, right? But it’s not a good thing, it’s definitely not a good thing,” one of the officers replies, adding:
“It’s not the end of the world. You will get past this, trust me. I would use this as a really good learning lesson. If you need to get some help for any issues, get it.”
Earlier this week, Taylor lashed out at the public for making such a big deal about her arrest and forcing her daughter to “relive” the night in question (the night when her mother threw a barstool in her direction).
We can certainly see why she would want to leave this night behind her.
But it would be good for Taylor to acknowledge that she screwed up royally and that she probably never should have been cast as the Bachelorette to begin with.
