One of Taylor Frankie Paul‘s contestants from her cancelled season of The Bachelorette is addressing one particular rumor!
Although no one can watch her journey to find love (and go through another breakup), some of her alleged dramatic on-set moments leaked online anyway — including the claim that she walked off when someone brought up her 2023 domestic violence arrest. A source alleged to TMZ in March that during a one-on-one date, Casey Hux asked Taylor about the case involving her baby daddy and ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen. He reportedly wanted to know if she had “learned from the experience and how she’d grown from it.”
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The source said she ended up getting “very emotional” after the question. Another insider alleged The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star even “had a full-fledged meltdown” and “stormed off the set.” At the time of the date, TMZ noted the rose hopeful had not seen the footage of the domestic violence incident, which showed her then-5-year-old daughter getting hit with a metal chair that she had thrown. It wasn’t until last month when the video leaked after news broke of an active domestic assault investigation into allegations made by both Taylor and Dakota that any of her contestants likely saw it.
But did Taylor really abruptly leave their date? According to Casey himself, that never happened! When asked if the rumor is true on the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast on Thursday, the 30-year-old mechanical engineer replied:
“Yeah, I’ll deny and tease a little bit.”
Casey said he had no clue “where [the rumors] came from,” but he insisted the MomTok star never stormed off the set with him. In fact, he shared that she was very upfront about her domestic violence history. What everyone saw in the video is exactly what Taylor told him:
“We were hanging out at an undisclosed place at an undisclosed time, and she brought up what happened and went into it in very intensive detail, just like with the incident with her kid. When that video came out, she had already very fully described it to me. Like, I had a mental image of that same scene. So it was not something she shied away from. She was asking us these same questions. She would ask the tough questions and needed to know these, and as someone that’s here with intentionality and someone that’s like, ‘I’m making a lifetime decision,’ you should know these things and should ask these questions.”
According to Casey, Taylor was also the first one to bring up her arrest to him “originally”:
“When she did, it took me a little while to process it. So she brought that up, and we were having a really good night at that time, and it just wasn’t the time or the place, and I didn’t really know how I was feeling.”
When Casey saw Taylor again, he decided to talk about the situation with her again and she was “super cool, calm and collected about it” — not having a meltdown as reported. He continued:
“There was no storming off. There was no anger. There was sadness. The only thing that I could imagine is being worse than the person on the receiving end of that is the person that knows they did that and has to live with that for the rest of their lives. If it was me, I would be beating myself up over that every day, and it would make it so hard, like, not to go back to that and not to lose control again because you’re just on edge all the time.”
Casey explained he felt it was important to talk about the incident again because of his past experience:
“But I brought it up and explained like, ‘Hey, this is why I ended my relationship. This is kind of a sore subject for me. This is probably something that, I don’t know, is close to me.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, it was the worst day of my life, and I did something about it. I gave up drinking after that.’ And it’s like, to me, that was enough.”
He continued:
“Like I didn’t need some long sob story about what happened. It was like she took an actionable change about what happened and showed intention, and has followed through on that and was accountable for it. Like that meant the world. I thought it was a really powerful moment between us two, and I’m really glad we got the opportunity to just sit down one-on-one and talk about it like that.”
Whelp, Bachelor Nation won’t get to see that “powerful moment” between them now! Watch the podcast (below) for the deets:
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, help is available. Consider calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233, or text START to 88788, or go to https://www.thehotline.org/.
If you have sincere cause to suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org.
[Image via Casey Hux/Instagram, Good Morning America/YouTube]
