Charity Lawson is opening up about the downsides of being on television. The former Bachelorette star opened up on an episode of Cheryl Burke's Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans podcast about the grueling conditions of filming ABC's Dancing With the Stars. Speaking of how the show took a toll on her mental health, she detailed being bullied by social media trolls, even to the point of receiving death threats.
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Charity says she went through hell.
"I’m surprised you guys don’t [have a therapist]," she said to Cheryl about DWTS. "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. It hit me like a ton of bricks."
She joined season 32 of the show after her time on 'The Bachelorette.'
Thinking DWTS would be a "piece of cake" after being lead on The Bachelorette's 20th season, the therapist decided to join the dance show during its 32nd season, where she partnered with professional dancer Artem Chigvintsev. But it wasn't as easy as she thought it'd be.
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Charity says DWTS was worse than 'Bachelor' or 'Bachelorette.'
Charity expressed that DTWS "was so much worse than Bachelor and Bachelorette." While Cheryl expressed her shock at the fact that the dancer experienced being bullied by social media trolls, Charity replied, "I don’t know if it’s shocking. I think to a certain degree it was expected."
She received death threats.
"I was getting death threats for existing," she said. "For not performing enough, for being conceited, for being entitled, for being the biggest b—- on the cast. It’s crazy." Charity added that she told her dance partner about the comments, and he brought it up with the show's executives. "If you look in comparison to every other contestant on this season, they don’t have this underneath their comments," she said. "It was so damaging night in, night out."
She hoped to be voted off the show.
"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," Charity said. "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."
Charity says the show painted a narrative of her.
Charity and Cheryl went on to claim that the show's video packages are edited to create a specific narrative. "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," Charity said. "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.'"
Click on the link to listen to the full podcast episode.
