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What did her ex-husband say?
The Taylor Frankie Paul arrest video is such an ugly mess. The whole situation is.
Following the barstool incident, Tate Paul spoke to authorities to issue a warning.
He claimed that Taylor’s mom was “coaching” his 3-year-old on what to say.
‘She’s coaching my daughter’
People has obtained audio from a February 24, 2023 call between Tate Paul and police.
“The grandmother, is, you know, obviously there’s a conflict of interest with her because it’s her daughter that did this,” he says during the recording.
He’s referring to Liann May, TFP’s mother.
She is, of course, the grandmother to Taylor’s daughter, Indy.
“I’ve noticed she’s already tried gatekeeping — not gatekeeping — but, like, she’s coaching my daughter and saying specific things,” Tate claimed in the recording.
At the time, Tate claimed that Indy had suffered a small injury to her head on the night of February 17, 2023.
That night, of course, being the night on which Taylor allegedly threw a stool at Dakota Mortensen, her boyfriend at the time.
By his own account, Dakota deflected the piece of furniture, where it struck Taylor’s young child.
Tate claimed that it was a “goose egg” injury — a folksy expression for a hematoma (bruise) on the head where there may be mild swelling and tenderness.
In the same breath, he admitted that it was impossible to document because it was small and covered by his child’s hair.
Apparently Indy ‘seemed fine’
Liann had apparently told authorities that Indy was not injured during Taylor and Dakota’s domestic violence incident.
Specifically, she told officers that Indy was asleep.
(Indy was 3 years old at the time, and it was after 3 AM when they stopped by the house.)
However, Liann told investigators that her grandchild “seemed fine” despite what had occurred.
If you ever had a “goose egg” bruise as a kid (from, say, hypothetically, tripping over nothing and slamming into the corner of a table in front of your entire fourth grade class), you know that they feel large but are actually very small.
Was Liann telling investigators the truth, or covering for her daughter? It really sounds like both.
3-year-olds might seem perfectly fine after they’ve calmed down after a tragic incident.
Coaching a child can feel like a helpful thing to do — for everyone involved, including the grandchild.
The people doing it seldom feel like they’re encouraging someone to lie, but simply to choose their words carefully.
But it would still qualify as covering for Taylor.
It seems like everything in her life is unraveling
Obviously, we here at THG cannot verify anything that Tate Paul said in 2023.
We also have to wonder what he would say now — whether he will give a statement about his ex in 2026 regarding this recording.
For now, we only have a lot of footage and reports from 2023.
And, of course, Taylor’s season of The Bachelorette was pulled by ABC in a panic — even though the 2023 incident was never a secret and was in fact old news to The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives viewers.
(It’s a shame, too, because one of her suitors led a pretty dramatic life himself.)
We have yet to see the end of the fallout from this. Things are looking grim for Taylor. And, frankly, for everyone in her life.
