During the Oct. 13 episode of Dancing With the Stars, Inaba criticized Johnson for including a lift in her samba routine, prompting her husband Chmerkovskiy to write on TikTok in a since-deleted post that fans “almost saw Fresh Prince enter the ballroom.”
As fans began interpreting the comment as a reference to Will Smith’s infamous Oscars slap in 2022, Inaba reacted, too, writing on her Instagram Stories Oct. 15, “So this is what we are doing now?”
Since then, Chmerkovskiy had issued multiple public apologies.
“I want to apologize from the bottom of my heart for my recent post,” he wrote on Instagram Oct. 15. “I have reached out to Carrie Ann to apologize directly and personally, and I also want to apologize publicly as I understand my words affect so many outside of our internal DWTS family.”
Two days later, Chmerkovskiy received a one-week suspension from the competition, barring him from dancing with partner Jenna Dewan on Dedication Night. Shortly after his suspension was issued, he reinforced his regrets to Inaba.
“In a moment where my instinct was to defend my wife,” he wrote on his Instagram Stories Oct. 17, “I made a poor decision to reference a meme to ‘keep my wife’s name’ out of the conversation, without stopping to think through what else that reference could imply, which was genuinely never my intention.”
The 40-year-old added, “Carrie Ann certainly didn’t deserve to get caught in the middle of my bad judgment, and I hate that she was.”
Chmerkovskiy is expected to return to the ballroom with Dewan for the Oct. 27 episode.
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