Yahoo Lifestyle Anna Delvey Skewers 'Predatory' 'Dancing With The Stars' After First-Round Elimination
Anna Delvey isn’t pleased with how her experience on “Dancing With the Stars” panned out.
After being booted from the ABC dancing competition in the first round of eliminations last week, the convicted faux heiress says she feels like she was taken advantage of.
“I feel that the show so obviously used me to drive up the ratings,” Delvey told NBC News. “That they never had any plans to give me any chance to grow and only cared about exploiting me for attention.”
“It was predatory of them to try [to] make me feel inadequate and stupid all while I did get progressively better, yet they chose to disregard that,” added Delvey, who found notoriety after posing as a European heiress to scam hundreds of thousands of dollars from members of New York’s well-heeled art and fashion scenes and from a slew of financial institutions.
Delvey was brutally honest about her feelings from the moment she was voted off “Dancing With the Stars” last Tuesday.
Asked what she learned from her experience after the live elimination, the Russian émigré replied with a curt “Nothing.”
Days after her departure, Delvey discussed her time on the show on Tori Spelling’s “misSpelling” podcast, where she told fellow Season 33 eliminatee that her blunt exit line was “the truth.”
“You guys told me what I’m supposed to do,” she said of the “DWTS” production team. “I tried to do it, and then I still was rejected. And I’m taking away nothing. This is what I’m taking away from it, because your advice was worthless.”
“I felt like, well, they were building me up. It’s, like, ‘Oh, well, only if you smile more, only if you do, like, x y z, it’s going to be so much better for you,’” Delvey said. “And it felt like they put so much effort trying to get me on the show, like, make me feel comfortable just to… eliminate me this early.”
During her stint on “Dancing With the Stars,” the show played up Delvey’s convict status while she performed wearing a bedazzled ankle monitor.
Delvey, whose legal name is Anna Sorokin, is currently on parole after serving more than three years in prison for second-degree grand larceny, attempted grand larceny and theft of services.
