The knotty question of whether Jax Taylor would return for Season 3 of “The Valley” has now been answered: Through his team, Taylor has issued a statement saying he is stepping away from the Bravo show himself in order to focus on his recovery and mental health.
The statement, obtained by Variety, reads thusly: “After an incredibly challenging year and many honest conversations with my team and producers, I’ll be stepping away from the next season of ‘The Valley.’ Right now, my focus needs to be on my sobriety, my mental health, and coparenting relationship. Taking this time is necessary for me to become the best version of myself — especially for our son, Cruz.”
In March, ahead of the show’s Season 2 premiere on April 15, Taylor revealed that he had been addicted to cocaine on and off for more than two decades. By stepping away, Taylor, who turned 46 on July 11, avoids the high likelihood of getting fired and increases his chances to return at some point during the show’s run. Bravo has not issued a comment.
Taylor’s transgressions have been chronicled on Season 2 of “The Valley” — the finale of which will air on July 22, to be followed by three reunion episodes. Two days before the season started production in July 2024, Taylor hurt his estranged wife (and fellow cast member) Brittany Cartwright in their Valley Village home by flipping over a coffee table, which hit her knee. He then proceeded to throw furniture and punch the wall, while their then 3-year-old son, Cruz, was in the next room. “Valley” star Nia Sanchez Booko, in an interview for a July 17 Variety story about the show’s second season, described her reaction after Cartwright told her about this violent domestic incident. “I was like, ‘It’s not safe. You definitely can’t be around him,’” she recalled telling Cartwright.
Taylor’s abusive outburst — again, just before the cameras began rolling on the second season — set forth a chain of events that now appear to have sealed his fate with “The Valley,” at least for now. Taylor and Cartwright separated in January 2024 (she took Cruz with her), and when Taylor physically hurt Cartwright more than six months later, she told the production, their castmates and executives at Bravo. So the event became the subject of the Season 2 premiere, and in the next episode, Taylor entered a mental health facility. As reported in June by Variety, “The Valley” executive producer Alex Baskin said that Taylor was prevailed upon to seek help by Cartwright, his sister and his manager and publicist (a team he still shares with Cartwright). Taylor’s employers — Bravo and Baskin’s production company, 32 Flavors — could not mandate that he get help. “That’s a step that someone has to take on their own,” Baskin said.
In the angry text messages Taylor sent to Cartwright from the facility, however — which were screenshotted and displayed on screen in a subsequent episode — Taylor made it clear that he did not want to be there, and blamed Cartwright. “You took my job away from me…I’ve worked so hard for two years for this and you took it from me,” read one. “Now do the work as a single mom. I am watching the cameras and your [sic] not there,” said another. “I will never ever forgive you…you destroyed the only thing that I love doing,” read a third. And so on.
Additionally, while at the facility — which Taylor revealed to Andy Cohen on Bravo’s nightly talk show “Watch What Happens Live” was Psyclarity Health — Taylor appeared to stalk Cartwright, by watching the cameras inside their house on his phone, and texting her telling her he knew what she was wearing. At another point, while Cartwright was filming in their house, a producer walked in to show her a text she’d received from Taylor: “I can hear everything: Childish behavior,” it read. When Cartwright went to see a divorce lawyer, she showed her some of Taylor’s texts, such as, “Everyone is gonna tell me if you tattle on me again.” The lawyer looked alarmed. “This is a lot of text messages — he’s obsessed,” she told Cartwright. “It’s unhealthy for you. He needs to control himself. This is not good.” Cartwright began her divorce proceedings that day, and he was served on camera after coming out of the facility.
As the season has continued, Bravo’s activist fandom has become increasingly vocal in their demands that Taylor be fired. On podcasts, on Instagram, in subreddits — all anecdotal evidence, yes, but presenting an irrefutably united front — viewers have made it clear that they’re sick of Taylor’s shit. On “Watch What Happens Live,” which is generally a fun hang and has a party atmosphere, Cohen looled like he could barely stomach Taylor, as the results one of the show’s flash viewer polls showed that Taylor had 0% support from the audience. In an essay for New York Magazine’s The Cut, writer Louis Staples called upon Bravo to fire Taylor, writing, “I understand why Bravo wanted to follow his story this season, but moving forward, there comes a point where paying someone hundreds of thousands of dollars to repeat the same abusive behavior patterns stops being defensible — or even entertaining.”
This point was perhaps further demonstrated in the July 15 episode, in which Taylor meets with Cartwright to discuss his limited visitations with Cruz. Cartwright asked Taylor how many Xanax he’d taken before coming over, presumably because of how calm he was, and when he said he hadn’t taken any, she said, “OK, because you’re not even acting like yourself.” From there, the conversation devolved, with Taylor acting victimized, and Cartwright saying that, after coming out of the facility, he’d gone right back to drinking and partying. She told him that he could have been taking medication for bipolar disorder for years, but, “Now is too late. You’ve already ruined our family!” When Taylor asked Cartwright why she was “trying to destroy the father of your son,” she said: “It’s not on me to take up for you anymore. Those days are gone, and over.” And then followed up with this devastating statement: “I cannot let Cruz be anything like you. And you should feel the same way.” Eventually, with a tearful Cartwright saying she couldn’t look at him, Taylor left the house.
This departure from “The Valley” isn’t the first time Taylor’s toxic behavior has had severe consequences for him. After Season 8 of “Vanderpump Rules,” the national reckoning on race that began in late spring 2020 caused Bravo to reshape the show’s cast. In June 2020, Stassi Schroeder and Kristen Doute were both fired because of their past racist actions against Faith Stowers, a Black former “Vanderpump Rules” cast member. Six months later, Taylor — who, like Doute and Schroeder, had also accused Stowers of crimes she hadn’t committed — was ousted from “Vanderpump Rules” when Bravo opted not to bring him back for Season 9, taking a then-pregnant Cartwright down with him.
Taylor, Cartwright and Doute all returned to the Bravo spotlight in spring 2023, when they became pundits about the Scandoval, the cheating scandal within the Season 10 “Vanderpump Rules” cast that caused the show to become a sensation. Taylor had been roommates with Tom Sandoval — the cheater in question — and Doute had dated him for years: The Bravosphere appeared to want them to share their Sandovalian insights, and they, in turn, appeared to relish being welcomed back into the spotlight. Though Doute always made it clear that she’d taken the reasons for her firing to heart and tried to learn from her mistakes, Taylor never made any such gestures. Nevertheless, when the Scandoval’s explosive popularity prompted Baskin to seize the moment to revive a pre-pandemic concept he’d had for “The Valley” — a show that “Vanderpump Rules” cast members could graduate into as they got older — Taylor, Cartwright and Doute were at the center of it. Bravo ordered “The Valley” straight to series.
In Episode 10 of the current season, Taylor returned home after being in the facility for 30 days. He threw a dinner for himself, and then had to invite himself to a party at Jesse Lally’s house where many of the cast in attendance avoided him. He wasn’t invited to the cast trip to Maui, where Doute’s boyfriend Luke Broderick had planned a secret proposal to her, and he hasn’t been around much, other than when he’s filmed with Tom Schwartz, his former “Vanderpump Rules” castmate to whom he moved next door.
In Variety’s interview with Sanchez Booko and Daniel Booko in early June, when asked whether Taylor should come back for the third season of “The Valley,” which will begin filming later this summer, they pondered the idea.
“Gosh,” Sanchez Booko said. “I mean, we wouldn’t have ‘The Valley’ if it weren’t for him, Kristen and Brittany. I feel there needs be acknowledgement that it’s his show.”
“He’s made it very clear over and over — it’s his show,” Booko said. “He casts it, he produces it. He does everything.” (Taylor is not a credited producer on “The Valley.”)
As they thought about it more, Booko wondered whether watching a “sober Jax on a season would be something to see,” but then added, “Although, he has obviously his anger issues — and rage.”
Of course, Taylor was gone for a considerable portion of Season 2 of “The Valley,” and there was no lack of material without him. The show’s already large cast created a number of stories that had nothing to do with Jax Taylor.
“Do I think he’s needed in Season 3?” Sanchez Booko asked rhetorically, pausing before she answered her question, and the question all “Valley” viewers have been contemplating. “I feel like we did fine.”