Ezra Sosa tearfully defended convicted felon Anna Delvey after some critics panned her Dancing With the Stars debut.
The pro dancer, 23, shared his thoughts via TikTok on Monday, September 23, revealing what happened behind the scenes of the ABC show’s September 17 premiere in which he and Delvey, 33, hit the dance floor for the first time.
“During that whole day, it was just truly the best day ever,” Sosa said. “In a sense, I felt so much love from literally every single person. Including [Delvey]. On my end, I was feeling so much positivity. On my partner’s end, she wasn’t receiving the same.”
Sosa’s eyes filled with tears as he went on to describe the “hardest part of my day”: Delvey’s reaction to criticism of her on the internet. Following their performance, “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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Delvey, who sported a bedazzled ankle monitor to dance the cha-cha, was arrested in 2017 and indicted on multiple counts of grand larceny and misdemeanor theft. She was released from prison on parole in 2021 and was put under house arrest one year later after being taken into custody for overstaying her visa. (A New York magazine profile about her was adapted for Netflix’s 2022 series Inventing Anna.)
“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,” Sosa acknowledged in his TikTok message. “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.”
Sosa concluded his post by saying that Delvey has “stepped up the plate and I just cannot wait for y’all to see how much she has improved.”
The next episode of the new DWTS season will air Tuesday, September 24. Delvey remains in competition along with rivals Tori Spelling, Ilona Maher, Phaedra Park and Jenn Tran, among other celebs.
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Earlier Monday, former DWTS pro Maks Chmerkovskiy slammed Delvey’s controversial casting on the show that put him in the spotlight as a dance professional.
“To me, [Delvey’s] job was a professional liar,” Chmerkovskiy said on the “TMZ Podcast,” adding. “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.”
Without mincing words, he judged her routine as “not great” and “very kind of standoffish.”
“You can blame the nerves and say, ‘Hey, everybody’s human and this person is not used to that stage.’ Bulls—,” he 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 sh—y dancer, and [her] personality is not really going to help her in this competition.”
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