Recently released footage from police body cameras offers new insights into the arrest of Taylor Frankie Paul, the former Bachelorette personality who fell from grace in 2023.
The new video, which was acquired by TMZ, reveals segments previously unseen from that night. It shows the 27-year-old, known for her role in Secret Lives Of Mormon Wives, engaging in a heated exchange with a police officer while appearing to be under the influence.
In a particularly emotional moment, the reality TV star is seen tearfully reaching out to her father for assistance, while the officer, visibly exasperated, attempts to conduct his questioning. At one point, she appears to mock the officer by asking, “What is your job, exactly?”
The footage captures events leading up to Paul’s arrest, where she confessed to hurling metal chairs at her then-boyfriend, Dakota Mortensen.
The Daily Mail has contacted both Paul and Mortensen for their comments on the incident.
Paul’s agitated demeanor is clear from the start of the new portion of the video, which begins in the midst of a tense interview on her front porch, while Mortensen is being interviewed inside her home.
Newly released police body-worn camera footage shows disgraced Bachelorette star Taylor Frankie Paul, 27, arguing with a police officer while visibly intoxicated before her 2023 arrest
Paul admitted to throwing metal chairs at then-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen, and a previous video obtained by the Daily Mail shows her admitting to also accidentally hitting her five-year-old daughter; pictured March 15 in Hollywood
‘I’m getting curious why I’m outside my house and he’s inside. Bring him out here and me inside. This is my house,’ she says while slurring her words.
The officer, whose voice stays calm, offers to do just that ‘in a minute.’
‘We were just hoping that a little bit of breathing cold air would be nice — hey, hey, hey!’ he continues as Paul turns and opens her front door while he’s mid-sentence.
She marched into the house, where Mortensen was speaking to another officer, and interrupted them.
‘You’re upset, I’m upset. Get out of my house,’ she tells Mortensen wearily.
He says something indistinct to her that isn’t fully caught on the bodycam audio, and Paul appears to parrot his words to him.
‘No “Taylor OK.” Get out of my house,’ she says as she and Mortensen walk up face-to-face near her kitchen.
The officer interviewing her sounds frustrated by the interruption, but Paul ignores him and grabs a glass from a cabinet to get some water.
The officer said he had her on the front porch to get some air and calm down, but Paul marched inside and said she wanted Mortensen to go outside so she could be inside her home
Paul claims Mortensen pushed her as she sobs on and off, but the officer tries to get her to calm down, as he is waiting for the primary officer to interview her when he’s finished speaking to Mortensen; Paul and Mortensen are pictured together
‘Hey, Taylor, when I told you how this was going down, OK, we’re trying to be kind right now and just find out what’s going on, but if you stop listening to the things we’re saying —’ he says as Paul whips out her cell phone and begins dialing.
‘[O]K, you’re good, no worries, you’re being nice, I get it,’ she says over the officer as she scrolls through her phone, apparently to find a number.
‘He’s pushed me — the man — in my garage, to my kid’s stuff [sic],’ Paul appears to say as the officer continues trying to speak to her.
‘Your children are here, and you need to stop yelling,’ he instructs her in a more forceful tone.
‘You’re good, understandable, you’re right,’ she agrees absentmindedly as she puts the phone to her ear to make a call.
‘And so when I asked you not to make a phone call right now, and you’re doing it…’ he continues, before Paul asks if that’s ‘illegal,’ to which he responds that it’s not.
Paul suddenly becomes tearful as she says on the phone, ‘Dad, please come to my house.
‘Dakota pushed me in my garage, and the police are saying that I can’t talk about it,’ she gasps.
The officer urges Paul to calm down and lower her voice so as not to wake up her children. She interrupts him repeatedly and gets a glass of water and calls her father, asking him to come observe
‘No, that’s not what we’re saying at all,’ the officer tells her calmly, before urging her to ‘take deep breaths’ because she’s allegedly ‘very intoxicated.’
He urges her again to keep her voice down because her children are trying to sleep.
‘Upstairs? With the white noise?’ she responds as she points upward, before the officer reminds her that one of her children is sleeping on the sofa just feet away from them.
After he asks her to ‘chill,’ she interrupts to ask, ‘Are you married, with kids?’
‘That is irrelevant,’ he replies, but Paul says, ‘It’s not,’ because that information informs how she feels in the moment.
‘My personal life is not terribly relevant right now,’ he continues. ‘My job is to help you calm down.’
As he tries to say that he is ‘trained’ to help people do just that, she interrupts to ask if she can have a glass of water.
‘You can have water,’ the officer replies, but Paul asks again, ‘Am I OK to get that.’
Paul, who slurs her words and calls a breathalyzer a ‘blezaryzer’ before correcting herself, claims she’s only at a ‘two out of 10’ level of intoxication; publicity still for The Bachelorette
‘I said you are,’ he reiterates coldly before she smacks a plastic glass against the countertop.
While she fills up the glass from her refrigerator, she goes back to his comment about her level of intoxication.
‘Extremely intoxicated? I’m like a two out of 10,’ she claims. ‘Please, enlighten me on that, by the way.’
She encourages him to ‘test me on that, if you want,’ but then suggests he use his breathalyzer, though she pronounces it so that it sounds like ‘blezaryzer,’ before correcting herself.
She adds that she got a ‘safe driver’ to take her home that evening from her ‘girls’ night.’
Paul then warns that her father will soon be there to witness the interaction, which the officer says is fine, and she accuses him of having ‘no empathy’ for her.
‘He just pushed me in the garage,’ she says of Mortensen as she begins to tear up again.
The officer then tries to explain again that he’s only there to help her calm down, and that they have to wait for the primary officer to finish with Mortensen before he can interview her.
A previously released portion of the bodycam footage showed Paul’s boyfriend Mortensen asking police if they could arrest him instead of her; he’s pictured in May of last year in LA at the Secret Lives Of Mormon Wives season two premiere
Paul accuses him of being on ‘his side’ through her sobs.
As he tries to explain himself, she interrupts again to say her ‘hand is aching,’ but she turns down the officer’s offer to have paramedics check her out.
‘Yelling, is that a crime?’ she asks him, and he clarifies that it’s not illegal.
‘I’m in so much pain!’ Paul cries as her sobs increase, and she puts her face in her hands, but when the officer asks if she wants to speak to anyone, like a ‘crisis worker,’ she responds, ‘No, I just want him to go home.’
Then Paul walks over to the sofa and appears to say ‘I’m sorry’ to her sleeping child, who is blacked out in the police footage.
‘I just wanna say goodnight, and then I want to go to bed. Is that OK?’ she asks. ‘Is that a crime?’
The officer tells her that she’ll have to wait while the primary interviews Mortensen, and Paul, who has stopped crying, asks if she can use the bathroom.
‘Do you have to do that right now?’ the officer asks her, before she says it’ll be ‘two seconds,’ before she closes the bathroom door, at which point the new video ends.
Video previously obtained by the Daily Mail shows an intoxicated and emotional Paul telling police she went ‘ballistic’ on boyfriend Mortensen after cops responded to a domestic violence call at her Utah home on February 17
The Mormon influencer can be seen crying and slurring her words as police attempt to talk to her about the altercation
Previous footage obtained by the Daily Mail revealed that Paul flew into a rage because her boyfriend refused to take her to a concert because she was too intoxicated.
The Mormon mom ‘went ballistic’ and threw chairs at boyfriend Dakota Mortensen, accidentally hitting her five-year-old daughter Indy in the head in the process.
And when police arrived at the scene in a Salt Lake City suburb, the influencer told them she was so scared she had ‘peed’ herself, the video shows.
Paul was arrested on February 17 at her home in Herriman, Utah, on misdemeanor charges.
But after Mortensen provided cops with video from his cell phone showing the chair hitting Indy, the charges were upgraded to felony aggravated assault, reckless child abuse, and domestic violence in the presence of a child.
Two weeks later, the Salt Lake County District Attorney charged Paul with two counts of 3rd degree felony domestic violence in the presence of a child with injury, a Class A misdemeanor of child abuse with injury, and Class B misdemeanor criminal mischief.
If she is convicted of the charges, she would face up to five years in state prison for each of the three felonies with which she is charged. She is next due in court on April 14.
Paul found fame on TikTok, where she has more than 4 million followers after regularly sharing content about her day-to-day life, two children and now estranged husband.
Paul – pictured in a TikTok video with Mortensen and daughter Indy – was arrested after cops learned she threw a chair at Mortensen that ended up striking the five-year in the head
When police arrived at the scene in a Salt Lake City suburb, the influencer told them she was so scared she had ‘peed’ herself, the video shows
When Paul was being placed under arrest for domestic violence, she asked the cop, ‘so he isn’t being arrested? He pushed me and I’m under arrest?’
Mortensen, who was also interviewed, told cops Paul has been struggling with personal issues and adding alcohol to the mix causes her to explode
She shocked her fans last summer when she admitted that she and husband Tate were divorcing because she had gone too far during a ‘soft swinging’ event.
Soft swinging involves couples swapping partners but not engaging in full sex.
After splitting with Tate — the father of her children — she started hooking up with Mortensen.
The bodycam video from the night of her arrest shows Herriman officers Ben Rugebregt and Alex Felsing knocking on Paul’s door after receiving a 911 from a neighbor.
Both Paul and Mortensen, her boyfriend of six months, are seen answering the door.
When the officers ask them what was going on, Dakota tells them Taylor was ‘hammered.’
Taylor responds back saying ‘so is he.’ She then tells police, that Dakota ‘threw me in the garage.’
Rugebregt and Felsing then separate the couple, taking Paul outside. She can be seen crying and slurring her words as police attempt to talk to her.
Mortensen, who has been dating Paul for six months, said he planned to pick her up from a friend’s house to go to a concert, but as soon as he arrived he realized she was too intoxicated to go
The ‘soft swinger’ who has amassed 4million followers on TikTok, shocked her fans last summer when she admitted that she and husband Tate were divorcing. She introduced Mortensen as her boyfriend to fans in a March 19 Instagram post
‘I’m emotionally hurting and going through a divorce,’ she tells them.
But seconds later she turns belligerent and says: ‘I don’t give a f*** anymore.
‘I don’t give a f*** about him,’ she says, referring to Mortensen. ‘I just want him out.
‘I pushed him, I hit him, he pushed me. I don’t care. I went ballistic because he pushed me. I just want him out.’
She went on to explain that her boyfriend had picked her up from a girls night and he ‘b****ed her out’ all the way home.
Taylor admitted to police she threw things at Dakota because she was scared of him, and he had pushed her first.
She also told police she wet her pants because she was scared.
But Mortensen, 30, told cops in the video that he had picked Taylor up from girls’ night out and she was drunk.
In Herriman Police’s report of the incident, the responding officer described smelling a ‘strong odor of alcohol coming from Taylor’
Police also interviewed Mortensen who said Paul became angry and violent after he refused to take her to a concert, the report reveals
He said they had an agreement to stay away from alcohol as he’s a recovering addict.
He told the police Paul is struggling with personal issues and adding alcohol to the mix causes her to explode.
He said he was supposed to go to a concert with a friend, but when Paul found out, she wanted to go along and asked him to pick her up from the party.
According to Mortensen, the original plan was to stop by Paul’s house to get her ID and then go to the concert, but as soon as he arrived he realized she was in no condition to go.
He said she then became angry and began to berate him on the drive back.
They arrived back at her house and a family member, who had been watching Indy and Paul’s two-year-old son Ocean, left.
Mortensen said over the next 90 minutes he tried to leave her house to ‘deescalate’ the situation, but Paul wouldn’t let him.
He said she threw her phone at him. She took his truck keys jumped on the vehicle and slammed its doors several times.
Cops reported seeing injuries on both Paul and Mortensen, but determined she was the primary aggressor
After Mortensen provided cops with video from his cell phone showing the chair hitting Indy, the charges were upgraded to felony aggravated assault, reckless child abuse, and domestic violence in the presence of a child, officers said
She hurled a wooden play set at him, which hit his truck. She also threw heavy metal chairs at him so violently that they put holes in the walls.
In his report Sergeant Rugebregt said he ‘observed multiple metal chairs and other household items on the floor by the front entryway. The chairs look like they may have come from a kitchen island.’
‘I observed a case of roses on the ground by the kitchen island,’ he added.
Mortensen said all of this violence took place in front of Indy. Ocean was upstairs asleep.
He told police that he started to feel scared for his life because of the weight of the chairs and said one bounced off his shoulder and hit Indy in the head.
He admitted pushing Paul out of his way, because she wouldn’t let him leave.
‘She fell down because she was hammered,’ he said.
The cops clearly did not realize that Paul was an internet celebrity.
She was booked on three misdemeanor charges – assault, criminal mischief and domestic violence in the presence of a child
Mortensen refused to say what caused her arrest, but let slip, ‘She never hurt anyone intentionally.’ Paul is pictured with daughter Indy, five, and two-year-old son Ocean
Taylor shares two young children, Indy and Ocean, with her ex-husband, Tate
When Mortensen started asking if her mugshot would be released, one officer can be heard saying: ‘It’s not like she’s going to make the news.’
When Paul was being placed under arrest for domestic violence, she asked the cop, ‘so he isn’t being arrested? He pushed me and I’m under arrest?’
After being placed in handcuffs she continued questioning the police officer on why she was being arrested.
She then added, ‘when Dakota sees I’m being arrested he’s not going to agree to it.’ She then said, ‘I p***ed my pants and I’m under arrest?’
During the arrest Paul’s parents, Jeremy and Liann May, arrived to take the kids.
While being handcuffed Paul told her mother: ‘I’m being arrested for pushing Dakota.’
Liann replied, ‘Yeah that’s domestic violence.’
While being placed in the back of the patrol vehicle Paul was still complaining about her arrest. She told the cop: ‘He punched me too and I’m a girl.’
Before she was led off to jail, Paul’s mother talked to her through the window of the patrol vehicle and didn’t mince her words, telling her, ‘My grandkids should have never seen this. I’m surprised you are doing this.’
Paul took a month off social media following her arrest. But she recently posted on TikTok that she has been taking Zoloft to help her with her depression and anxiety and was going to therapy to help deal with her trauma.
She also said she recently spent time with Mortensen’s family in Logan, Utah, and how she loves all of them. She announced that she is keeping her kids off TikTok for now, but not forever. She did not mention her pending court battles.
