Taylor Frankie Paul, Domestic Violence, and The Bachelorette: Everyone Is Missing the Point

What the fallout from Taylor Frankie Paul reveals about where we actually are on domestic violence, accountability, and gender

By Kaitlyn Boseck, LICSW

A Viral Reel and What It Told Us

A few weeks ago, I posted a Reel walking through the Taylor Frankie Paul and Dakota situation through a clinical lens, specifically using the Power and Control Wheel, a well-established framework in domestic violence research and trauma-informed care.¹ The response was staggering: nearly 40,000 views, over a thousand likes, hundreds of shares, hundreds of comments, hundreds of saves.

The volume of the response was surprising because of what it revealed: an enormous number of people had been watching her reality TV life unfold and feeling something they could not quite name. The Reel gave them a framework. And frameworks, it turns out, are what people are starving for.

This post is the longer version of what I could not fit into a 60-second clip. It is an attempt to situate what happened to Taylor Frankie Paul, and the public's reaction to it, within a broader cultural pattern. Because this is not an isolated story. It is a data point in a much larger dataset about how our society understands, assigns, and avoids accountability when it comes to intimate partner violence.

What the Power and Control Wheel Actually Tells Us About This Situation

As a trauma therapist who works with survivors of intimate partner violence, one of the first tools I reach for is the Power and Control Wheel, developed by the Duluth Model in the 1980s.² It is not a checklist. It is a map of how abuse operates systemically over time. It identifies patterns including intimidation, isolation, emotional abuse, minimizing and denying, using children, economic control, and coercion and threats, that together create an environment in which a victim's autonomy is progressively dismantled.

The wheel distinguishes between violence used as a tool of control versus violence that emerges as a reaction to ongoing abuse. This distinction is not a loophole. It is clinically significant, legally recognized in some jurisdictions, and documented extensively in trauma therapy research and DV literature.

In the 2003 footage  to TMZ, what viewers observed in the Taylor Frankie Paul and What viewers observed in the 2023 footage tracks closely with reactive abuse, a well-documented phenomenon in which a victim, having been subjected to sustained psychological, emotional, or physical abuse, eventually responds with aggression.³ Children who witness violence are harmed by it regardless of who the target is. Exposure to intimate partner violence is itself a form of childhood trauma, and the concern for the children in that home is valid and important. What the clinical framing asks us to do is hold that concern alongside the context that so often gets stripped out of the narrative.

None of this means Taylor Frankie Paul is a perfect victim, whatever that would even mean. It means her behavior, viewed in isolation, cannot be accurately assessed without the surrounding context of the relationship dynamics. This is true in every domestic violence case, without exception.

The Bachelorette Decision: A Double Standard Worth Naming

Taylor Frankie Paul was removed from the cast of The Bachelorette. The decision generated headlines, commentary, and no small amount of public approval from people who felt this was the appropriate consequence for someone who had engaged in violent behavior.

The problem is not the consequence in isolation. The problem is the selective application of that standard across a media landscape that has been remarkably tolerant of documented abusers.

Bachelor Nation has not operated in a vacuum. Former leads and contestants from the franchise have been publicly linked to incidents of domestic violence, assault, and harassment over the years, with consequences that ranged from brief social media criticism to no consequence at all. The broader entertainment industry continues to platform, celebrate, and financially reward athletes, musicians, executives, and politicians with documented histories of intimate partner violence. Not alleged. Not contextual. Not reactive. Documented.

The Epstein files are perhaps the starkest example: a network of powerful men whose participation in the systematic abuse of minors has been extensively documented, and whose careers, reputations, and public personas remained largely intact or were only moderately impacted. Politicians named in those files remain in office. Celebrities connected to that network continue to work. The cultural machinery of minimization operates swiftly and efficiently when the people implicated have sufficient social capital.

Taylor Frankie Paul does not appear to have that same social capital. And that asymmetry is worth interrogating. Not to argue that she should face no accountability, but to ask why the threshold for consequences appears to be so much lower for her than for others whose conduct is arguably far less contextually complicated.

"If This Was a Man You Wouldn't Defend Her." Let's Talk About That

The most common criticism I received in response to my Reel followed a predictable template: "If this was a man doing this, you would not be defending him." And its close relative: "This is exactly what is wrong with feminism. You think men cannot be victims."

These critiques deserve a direct response, because they are conflating several distinct arguments into one.

First: analyzing Taylor Frankie Paul's behavior through a DV framework is not a defense of violence. It is a clinical assessment of context. The same analysis applied to a male victim of DV who reacted with violence toward their abusive female partner would reach the same conclusions, because the Power and Control Wheel is not gendered in its application. The framework follows the dynamics, not the gender of the person using it.

Second: the argument that "men cannot be victims" was never made. Not in the Reel, not by clinicians applying this framework, not by the DV advocates who have spent decades developing these models. Male victims of intimate partner violence are real, underreported, underserved, and systematically failed by a culture that stigmatizes male vulnerability.⁴ That is a genuine and serious problem. It exists independently of this case.

Third, and this is the part that tends to get lost: calling out a double standard in how Taylor Frankie Paul's case was handled relative to the cases of documented male abusers is not the same as saying men cannot be abused. These are separate claims. The conflation of them is itself a rhetorical move that shuts down the more complex analysis this situation actually requires.

The "if this was a man" argument assumes a level playing field that does not exist. It imagines a world in which male perpetrators of DV face swift, consistent public accountability, which is demonstrably not the world we live in. It builds a counter-argument against a reality that has not materialized.

A Feminist Analysis of DV Is Not the Same as Saying "Men Cannot Be Victims"

A feminist analysis of domestic violence does not argue that women are inherently good and men are inherently bad. It examines power: how it is distributed, how it is used, how it is protected by institutions, and how it shapes the consequences people face when they behave badly.

Patriarchal systems have historically constructed the "ideal victim" as passive, compliant, and visibly broken.⁵ Women who fight back, who throw chairs, who are angry, who do not cry on cue, are routinely disbelieved, blamed, and penalized more harshly than the people who created the conditions that led to their behavior. This is not a theory. It is a documented pattern in legal outcomes, media coverage, and public discourse.

A feminist framework also acknowledges that women can be perpetrators of domestic violence, that men can be victims, that same-sex relationships are not exempt from these dynamics, and that abuse is ultimately about power and control rather than gender identity. These are not contradictions. They are part of a complete, nuanced understanding of how intimate partner violence actually operates.

What the Taylor Frankie Paul situation makes visible is not that women get a pass. The data on how female victims of DV are treated by the legal system, the media, and their communities suggests the opposite. What it makes visible is that the standards are inconsistent, that accountability is unevenly distributed, and that context is selectively applied depending on who is doing the assessing and who is being assessed.

Taylor Frankie Paul and Domestic Violence Awareness: Where We Actually Are in 2026

The viral response to a 60-second Reel about a reality TV figure and her abusive relationship is, in miniature, a portrait of where we are culturally.

We are a society that is consuming more content about domestic violence than ever before, through docuseries, podcasts, true crime, and social media, while simultaneously struggling to apply even the most basic clinical frameworks to what we are watching. We know the terminology now. "Gaslighting" and "trauma bonding" have entered the mainstream lexicon. And yet the application of those frameworks to real cases still produces significant public resistance when the person in question does not fit the template of a sympathetic victim.

It is also worth naming what tends to get overlooked in these conversations: children who grow up in homes where domestic violence is present are experiencing childhood trauma. The research on childhood trauma is unambiguous about the long-term impact on neurological development, attachment, and mental health.⁶ When we debate whether Taylor "really" had it that bad, or whether her reaction invalidates her experience, we are also implicitly debating what we are willing to call harmful for the children who were in that home. That is not a small thing. In trauma therapy, one of the most consistent patterns I see is adults who spent decades minimizing what happened to them as children because the adults around them minimized it first

A significant part of the backlash directed at those of us who applied a DV framework to Taylor’s situation was about the children — and that criticism deserves to be named directly. Taylor being in a violent home, and potentially being a victim of coercive control, does not erase or minimize the harm her children experienced. Children who witness domestic violence are experiencing a form of childhood trauma, full stop. Identifying Taylor as a victim is not a defense of her choices or their impact on her kids. It is an attempt to contextualize a pattern of behavior. The clinical and research consensus is clear: coercive control and psychological abuse typically precede and surround physical violence — meaning the harm to those children almost certainly did not begin with the chairs being thrown.⁷ It began earlier, in the sustained environment those dynamics create. Naming that is not about excusing it. It is about understanding the full picture so that children, and the adults in their lives, can actually get help..

We are not close to equity. We are not close to consistency. We are in a moment where the language of accountability is widely available but the actual practice of it remains deeply selective. Powerful men with documented histories of abuse keep their platforms. Women who react to abuse lose theirs. And the public debate about whether that asymmetry is real gets derailed, repeatedly, by arguments that reframe the conversation away from the systemic and back toward the individual.

The virility was not about Taylor Frankie Paul. They were about recognition. People saw something they had experienced, or witnessed, or suspected, and they finally had a framework that made it legible. That is what clinical education can do when it meets a cultural moment. And that is exactly why these conversations are worth having at length, beyond the 60-second format, where the nuance can breathe.

What This Story Is Really Telling Us

Taylor Frankie Paul being removed from The Bachelorette may be a defensible decision. But it does not exist in a vacuum, and pretending it does requires us to ignore a long and well-documented history of the entertainment industry giving much wider latitude to people whose conduct is far less ambiguous.

Men can be victims of domestic violence. Women can perpetrate it. Both of those things are true, and neither of them is undermined by analyzing Taylor Frankie Paul's situation through the lens of the Power and Control Wheel. A clinical framework applied consistently is not an agenda. It is a tool.

What the fallout from this story tells us, most of all, is that we are still in the early stages of building a genuinely equitable understanding of intimate partner violence, one that holds context and accountability together, that can distinguish between perpetration and reaction, and that applies the same standards regardless of who is in the room and how much cultural capital they carry.

We are not there yet. But conversations like this one are part of how we get closer.

About the Author

Kaitlyn Boseck, LICSW is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker and trauma therapist based in Massachusetts. She specializes in relational trauma, intimate partner violence, anxiety, and ADHD in women, with a clinical approach that is direct, feminist, and deeply informed by attachment theory and trauma research.

If you are in Massachusetts and recognize something in what you just read, whether in Taylor's story, in the patterns described here, or in your own life, therapy is a space where that recognition can become something more than a feeling you cannot name.

Kaitlyn currently accepts new clients for virtual therapy in Massachusetts.

To inquire about availability or schedule a free consultation, email Kaitlyn at kaitlyn@kaitlynbpsychothrapy.com, or follow along at @therapy.withkb on Instagram for more trauma-informed content that meets pop culture where it lives.

Notes

1. Pence, E., & Paymar, M. (1993). Education groups for men who batter: The Duluth model. Springer Publishing Company.

2. Pence, E., & Paymar, M. (1993). Education groups for men who batter: The Duluth model. Springer Publishing Company.

3. Walker, L. E. (1979). The battered woman. Harper & Row. See also: Johnson, M. P. (2008). A typology of domestic violence: Intimate terrorism, violent resistance, and situational couple violence. Northeastern University Press.

4. Breiding, M. J., Chen, J., & Black, M. C. (2014). Intimate partner violence in the United States — 2010. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

5. Christie, N. (1986). The ideal victim. In E. A. Fattah (Ed.), From crime policy to victim policy (pp. 17–30). Macmillan.

6. Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.

7. Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.

Kaitlyn Boseck, LICSW

Trauma Therapist & Psychotherapist | @therapy.withkb

Kaitlyn B. Psychotherapy