Allison Holker hints at abuse in 'dance community' that 'tore me apart for a lot of years'

Allison Holker is opening up about a painful chapter in her life.

The So You Think You Can Dance judge and widow of the late DJ and dancer Stephen "tWitch" Boss discussed having "experienced my first time really feeling like I'd been taken advantage of" in a recent interview on the The Jamie Kern Lima Show.

As detailed in her forthcoming memoir, This Far: My Story of Love, Loss, and Embracing the Light, Holker spoke with Lima alleging she "had some older man really take advantage of the vulnerability that women go through" at the age of 17. Holker says this vulnerability is "especially" precarious "in the dance community, "where we look up to our teachers and we just trust them. Dance can be very physical. It can be very sexual, even at a young age. That was taken advantage of, and it tore me apart for a lot of years because I felt like it was my fault."

Related: Ellen DeGeneres mourns the death of Stephen 'tWitch' Boss: 'I loved him with all my heart'

"I felt like it was my fault," Holker continued, "because how could it have gotten to that place? I must have done something wrong and I felt so much shame in who I was, and I was so embarrassed."

Holker has accomplished feats that most dancers dream of since that time. Beginning her training at The Dance Club in Orem, Utah Holker performed at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City when she was only 14. She then went on to appear in High School Musical before being cast as a professional dancer on season 19 of So You Think You Can Dance, where she eventually met Boss.

Despite all this, she still feels the impact of that early traumatic experience. "To this day it's one of those things. Man, if I would have just spoken out for myself, maybe I could have built myself back up and helped other young girls, too, to not let that happen. But I felt a lot of shame in myself, and it was really hard for me to work through that for so many years," she said.

Holker says healing from the experience took "many years," but she's "proud of myself now to own that now, 'No, it wasn't me, I was taken advantage of.'" While This Far does delve into Holker's early traumatic experiences, the memoir focuses mainly on the Boss's death by suicide at the age of 40 in 2022.

The dancer opened up to PEOPLE earlier this month about discovering the extent of his addiction to drugs after he passed. That interview, and the memoir itself, have become the subject of intense criticism from some of Boss's family and friends.

Family friend Courtney Ann Platt called This Far "the most tacky, classless, opportunistic act I have ever seen in my entire life," and alleged that Holker had Boss's friends and family "sign some weird NDA to attend his funeral" so that she could "write a book with all the dirty laundry smearing his name."

Related: So You Think You Can Dance contestant says she was attacked with acid and stabbed in London

Holker responded to Platt, Boss' brother, Dré Rose, and others shortly thereafter, explaining that her only motivations for writing the memoir were "to celebrate the love and life I shared with Stephen and our three beautiful children," and to "help someone else who might see themselves or a loved one in Stephen. In sharing I hope that maybe they can catch some the red flags that I missed before it's too late."

It's the children Holker shares with Boss - Maddox Laurel Boss, 8, and daughter Zaia Boss, 5 - that she says inspired her to open up about the difficult chapters in her life in the memoir. "When I had my daughter, I realized that I need to build her up," she told Lima, "If anything ever happened to her, you know, come to someone, come to me, come to someone you feel safe with and say, 'This was wrong, and that should never have happened.'"

You can watch the rest of Holker's interview with Lima below.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly