“I’ve never seen her like that and it broke my heart,” Ezra Sosa shares in emotional TikTok, adding, “No one deserves the amount of hate that she’s getting right now.”
Anna Delvey’s partner on Dancing with the Stars is expressing his support for the controversial contestant.
On Monday, professional dancer Ezra Sosa shared a TikTok video, in which he got emotional as he claimed that Delvey broke down in tears after seeing mean comments from viewers following their debut performance on the show’s premiere.
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“During that whole day, it was just truly the best day ever,” Sosa began, reflecting on his official debut as a professional dancer on DWTS. “In a sense, I felt so much love from literally every single person, including my partner. On my end, I was feeling so much positivity. On my partner’s end, she wasn’t receiving the same.”
Sosa then started to get choked up while recalling how Delvey purportedly reacted to viewers’ comments after last Tuesday’s Season 33 premiere.
“I think the hardest part of my day. After our press line, she was reading the comments and we couldn’t find her,” he said. “We finally found her in the bathroom. She was crying. I’ve never seen her like that and it broke my heart. As her partner, I want to give her the best experience she possibly could [have]. And knowing that that’s not the case, it really did break my heart.”
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“I know what she did was really controversial and was not right, and I can never justify that for her and for anyone in her life,” he continued. “It’s really hard for me because this person that I truly am just falling in love with every day in rehearsal, isn’t the person that everyone sees in the media. No one deserves the amount of hate that she’s getting right now. She deserves a second chance.”
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Sosa concluded his video by sharing that Delvey has “stepped up to the plate” and said he “cannot wait” for fans to watch Tuesday night’s episode to “see how much she has improved.”
Delvey’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars has been met with controversy since she was announced. The 33-year-old, whose real name is Anna Sorokin, was convicted of larceny after allegedly posing as a German heiress and scamming thousands of dollars from New York elites to fund her luxurious lifestyle.
Her story was dramatized for Netflix’s Inventing Anna, which starred Julia Garner as Delvey, and had Shonda Rhimes as its showrunner.
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Delvey was released from prison in 2021 after serving four years, but has since been on house arrest while fighting her deportation case. Delvey admitted she was granted permission from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be a part of DWTS, and must wear her ankle monitor while competing.
During Tuesday’s DWTS premiere, she donned a bedazzled ankle monitor for her and Sosa’s cha cha. Delvey received a score of six from all three judges, with a total score of 18. See her performance below.
Meanwhile, Sosa’s video came just a few days after DWTS alum Maksim Chmerkovskiy criticized Delvey’s casting and her dancing ability during an appearance on The TMZ Podcast.
“To me, [Delvey’s] job was a professional liar. You’re gonna bring that person [on stage] and say, ‘Here’s a platform that a lot of people waited their entire actual career to be a part of,’ to also get a moment of a personal story [where they] can say, ‘This is who I actually am.’ Will I believe anything this lady says? Absolutely not.”
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He then accused Delvey of being “standoffish” on the show.
“You can blame the nerves and say, ‘Hey, everybody’s human and this person is not used to that stage.’ Bulls–t,” Chmerkovskiy said. “Hold on a second — didn’t she con people into believing she was, like, fully fashion this and special like that? And that takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of self-control to present yourself a certain way, even if you’re so nervous. I don’t buy this ‘she was nervous’ stuff. She’s a s—-y dancer, and [her] personality is not really going to help her in this competition.”
Dancing with the Stars continues with an Oscars theme and double elimination Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and Disney+.
