ABC Kaitlyn Bristowe at the Dancing With the Stars finale
Some Dancing With the Stars fans may not know this, but season 29 winner Kaitlyn Bristowe says she was supposed to compete on the show coming off of her season as The Bachelorette back in 2015. But Bristowe has said over the years that Bachelor creator Mike Fleiss wouldn’t allow her to appear on the dancing competition show.
In 2017, a fan asked Bristowe on Twitter why she had never appeared on Dancing With the Stars and she responded, “Actually I was offered it, had the contract & Mike Fliess told me I wasn’t allowed. He said he didn’t want people wanting fame after his show.”
At the time, Fleiss responded by saying she had his “total support if she wants to appear on DWTS,” to which Bristowe said, “Thanks I’ll get right on that opportunity 2 yrs ago. I wonder what changed your mind?”
Fast forward to Bristowe winning season 29 and Fleiss congratulating her on Twitter for her win — and taking partial credit, something Bristowe responded to in a recent podcast interview on “Chicks in the Office.” Here’s what she said.
Fleiss Tweeted That It Took ‘Us’ Five Years
No one was more thrilled than I was to see @kaitlynbristowe take home the mirror ball!!! Took us 5 years, but we finally got it done!!!
In a tweet the night of Bristowe’s win, Fleiss wrote, “No one was more thrilled than I was to see @kaitlynbristowe take home the mirror ball!!! Took us 5 years, but we finally got it done!!!”
The “Chicks in the Office” hosts asked Bristowe about the tweet and she said she definitely “saw that tweet” and that she’s taking it in stride, even if she was “so angry for so long” when she didn’t get to do Dancing With the Stars five years ago.
“I like to think that he has learned through this too. So I just tried to take that tweet as OK, you know what, sure, ‘we’ did it,” said Bristowe.
She Is Actually Glad She Had to Wait Five Years
Looking back, Bristowe is glad it worked out this way because she’s a different person now than she was then.
“Everything happens for a reason,” she said, adding, “I realized that even if it takes five years, if you stay true to who you are and you stand up for yourself and even if you could be pissing off the head of someone you should probably be trying to impress if it’s what you believe in and if you stand up for yourself, karma is a real thing. It’ll all come around.”
She added that coming off of The Bachelorette and heading straight into Dancing With the Stars would have been incredibly difficult — she’s not sure how Bachelorette Hannah Brown did it.
“I would have been a jaded mess five years ago. I would have been like everybody’s out to get me, these producers are trying to mess with me, I wouldn’t have been able to take the experience for what it was because … of the relationship I had just gotten into, being engaged, you’re still getting to know somebody,” said Bristowe.
She continued, “I don’t know how Hannah did it. I’ve never been more tired in my life coming off Bachelor and Bachelorette, and the amount of work, the physically demanding work that’s put into Dancing With the Stars — I don’t know how she did it. I was a trainwreck during the whole thing just from being so mentally and physically tired and I can’t imagine coming off Bachelor to Bachelorette to that.”
Dancing With the Stars will return for its 30th season in spring 2021.
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Kaitlyn Bristowe Responds to ‘Bachelor’ Creator Owning Her ‘DWTS’ Win