Charity Lawson is getting honest about her time on Season 32 of “Dancing With the Stars.”
During the Monday episode of Cheryl Burke’s “Sex, Lies and Spray Tans” podcast, the former Bachelorette opened up about her experience on “The Bachelor,” “The Bachelorette” and “DWTS,” first noting that, as a therapist, she believes that “DWTS” should have a therapist on set.
“I’m surprised you guys don’t. Honestly, I’m very surprised because quite literally, while ‘Dancing With the Stars’ was great, I literally went through hell and back with my mental health in that show,” Lawson told Burke. “It hit me like a ton of bricks”
Lawson, partnered with Artem Chigvintsev, came in fourth place during her season on the reality competition series but experienced a great amount of bullying, she explained on the episode. When Burke said that was shocking, Lawson disagreed.
“Is it shocking? I don’t know if it’s shocking. I think to a certain degree it was expected,” she said. After the criticism she got from viewers during “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette,” Lawson expected the “Dancing With the Stars” audience to be kinder.
“I came into the ‘Dancing With the Stars’ fanbase like, ‘This is going to be a piece of cake,’ only to be… almost to the point where it was so much worse than ‘Bachelor’ and ‘Bachelorette,’” Lawson said. “I was getting death threats for existing… for not performing enough, for being conceited, for being entitled, for being the biggest bitch on the cast. It’s crazy.”
Lawson said that she received awful comments on her own social media and on the official “Dancing With the Stars” account. Eventually, she had to tell her partner, who went to the executives on the show and tried to protect her.
“It was so damaging, night in, night out,” said Lawson, adding that she “blocked and filtered” comments on her page, but they were never filtered on the show’s page. “I had to tell Artem, ‘This is unfortunately what we’re dealing with and what we’re up against.’ If you look in comparison to every other contestant on this season, they don’t have this underneath their comments… I’m just literally existing and being called a bitch.”
Lawson began to cry during the interview and said that while she can only speak to her own experience, she thought it was important to note because of “the difference that I have to go through this life as a Black woman and being on a reality TV show. It’s like the same things are just not protected.”
She continued, “I just had to suppress it and it got to the point where I was like, I’m just trying to survive. I’m just trying to make it out of the season… There were weeks where I’d come home from rehearsal where I’m like, I literally hope I forget my steps and get voted off… It’s a really dark place.”
Burke, who competed on 25 seasons of the ABC series, added that the video packages are part of the politics that go into the show — something Lawson agreed with, noting she was simply answering producers’ questions in her interviews.
“It’s shaped this way that I was boasting and bragging about my scores but I’m only talking about them because you guys asked me,” said Lawson. “That was really frustrating when I started to see my packages painted in this way; it’s almost skewing the viewers in this way of, ‘All she cares about are scores’ [and] ‘She thinks she’s better than everyone.’”
At the end of the podcast, Lawson was asked if she felt that whether her race affected the outcome of “Dancing With the Stars,” to which she simply responded, “Yeah.”