“Did I ruin your life, or did I help your life?”

Taylor Frankie Paul first asked the question in the early days of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the Hulu reality show that follows what is known as MomTok, a group of young Mormon influencers in Utah. At the time, when the show debuted in September 2024, Paul’s question was rhetorical, but the answer had already seemed obvious: None of the women would be on television had it not been for Paul’s public admission to “soft-swinging.” That, for better or worse, their nascent fame was directly tied to Paul’s chaos.

Four seasons later, the swinging scandal that catapulted MomTok to reality TV stardom feels small, even quaint, against new domestic violence allegations between Paul and her on-again, off-again partner, Dakota Mortensen. But they are only new in the sense that older ones exist; similar allegations between Paul and Mortensen played out in the show’s very first season and resulted in Paul’s arrest. (She later struck a deal and pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated assault.) On Thursday, TMZ published a video recording of that 2023 incident, which captured Paul throwing chairs at Mortensen with her young daughter in the room, quickly forcing the big decision: Shortly after the video,........

© Mother Jones