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Charity Lawson Reveals Mental Health Struggles on 'Dancing With the Stars'
Charity Lawson opens up candidly about how she handled cyberbullying while competing on Dancing With the Stars. It was much worse than what she faced on 'Bachelorette'
Alumni of Bachelor and Bachelorette Charity Lawson opens up candidly about how she handled cyberbullying while competing on Dancing With the Stars. Lawson came fourth with her professional dance partner Artem Chigvintsev. She claimed that network executives were not standing up for her and that she was being bullied by fans.
For Charity Lawson, competing in Dancing With the Stars was anything but glamorous. It was awful. Partnered with professional dancer Artem Chigvintsev, the former Bachelorette became a target of pervasive online harassment. Lawson said on Cheryl Burke's podcast that relentless bullying caught up with her mental health severely.
Lawson, no stranger to the relatively right-leaning world of Bachelor Nation, found that the level of vitriol hurled at her on both her personal and the official DWTS social media accounts was unlike anything she'd experienced. It was literally being attacked for existing, with people criticizing how she danced to what type of person they felt she was.
In an episode of Cheryl Burke's Sex, Lies and Spray Tans podcast, Lawson revealed that she "went through hell and back with my mental health" during Season 32 of the dance competition show.
Burke expressed her shock, to which Lawson, a child and family therapist, responded, "Is it shocking? I don't know if it's shocking. I think to a certain degree it was expected."
Lawson thought DWTS would be easier after the backlash she faced on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, but it turned out to be "so much worse."
She received death threats for simply existing, not performing well enough, and being perceived as conceited and entitled. Lawson found it "so damaging, night in, night out."
She said that while she had blocked and filtered out hurtful comments on her own Instagram page, the official show account hadn't— even after Chigvintsev brought the issue to executives.
Lawson teared up as she talked through her experience in the film, speaking of the specific challenges she faces as a Black woman on reality TV. "It's like the same things are just not protected," she said.
She recalled dark moments during rehearsals where she willed herself to forget her steps and get voted off.
Lawson said that while she could control comments on her own accounts, the official Dancing With the Stars pages left up negative comments. "That's where the emotional and mental part came in really hard," she said.
In a poignant conclusion, Lawson placed her bet that race played a big role in how things turned out with her DWTS journey, and it surely left the audience pondering over public figures' daily challenges, especially women of color.
In fact, there came a point when she considered withdrawing from the competition if only to get away from the harassment, only that she wanted to fight it through tp respect her hard work.
Lawson was a contestant on the 32nd season of The Bachelorette in 2023. Actress Xochitl Gomez from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and professional Val Chmerkovskiy emerged as champions. Lawson came in fourth but had received praise from the judges all along.
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