Getty Images Maksim Chmerkovskiy previously apologized for making insensitive comments.
Longtime “Dancing With the Stars” pro Cheryl Burke says that she received an apology from Maksim Chmerkovskiy after he fat-shamed her on the earlier days of the popular dance competition show.
“He apologized years ago when this whole thing happened. He apologized to me and my mother, actually, which was nice of him,” Burke told the New York Post. “But look, is there closure? I don’t know if there’s closure. I mean, it’s not just because of him saying anything. It goes back to my dancing and competition career,” she continued.
“This has always been an issue because I am a curvy girl and that’s just the way it is. And I can’t change where my bones are or my hips. And it’s just — it is what it is. And either I accept it or I don’t. And obviously, when all your whole life it’s been centered around basically that, it’s hard to accept it. So, I think, at the end of the day, I [need] closure with myself. And in order for that to happen, I have to love me and the body that God blessed me with, really,” she added.
In July 2022, Burke revealed that she has body dysmorphia. “When I look at myself in the mirror and someone says, ‘Oh, you look amazing,’ I see someone who is overweight and, in my eyes and in my way of judging myself, not amazing. It’s like no matter what I look like,” she said on an episode of the “HypochondriActor” podcast.
Here’s what you need to know:
Maks Chmerkovskiy Previously Made Comments About the Weight of Some Female Dancers on the Show
Many years ago, Chmerkovskiy had some opinions about some of the pro dancers on the show.
“When I first saw these women this season, I said, ‘Guys, you know the camera adds 10 pounds. ‘You have to do something about this,'” he said, according to the Boston Herald. And he wasn’t the only male pro to express his feelings about some of the female pros and their body types.
“[People] look at this show to be inspired and think, ‘If I just work hard enough, I can look like that,” Louis Van Amstel told TV Guide (via Today). “If they watch someone who’s dancing her butt off and she’s still heavy, they can be discouraged. You have to take that responsibility,” he added.
However, Burke has moved forward from this and is good friends with both Chmerkovskiy and Van Amstel, neither of whom are on DWTS any longer.
Cheryl Burke Wrote About the Hurtful Comments in Her Memoir
The comments made by Burke’s colleagues really stuck with her and she wrote about the aftermath in her book, “Dancing Lessons.”
“Those comments made things a little tense behind the scenes for a while. I was hurt that Maksim and Louis didn’t seem to have my back; they were upset that their comments were taken too ‘literally’ and supposedly out of context,” Burke wrote.
“In the end, we all took the high road and moved on. After all, we were going to see one another all season. I had to let go of any anger so that I could keep moving forward. But that’s not to say that I didn’t hold on to the glaring truth of the whole ugly incident,” she continued.
“I had to face the fact that my body and my metabolism were changing. I was getting older. I was only twenty-four years old at the time, but my body was no longer responding to big dinners or nights out the way it used to,” she continued, explaining that she went on to change her diet in an effort to change the way she looked.
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