Wondering what the vibes are like behind the scenes on Dancing With the Stars amid Val Chmerkovskiy being benched for a week? Apparently, producers are “furious,” and Val had to apologize to Carrie Ann Inaba for his “Oscar Slap” comment in order to keep his job.
“He won’t be [fired], no,” a source tells The Sun. “But producers on the show encouraged him to save face by making an apology to her. He doubled down on the joke at first, and once the backlash got as loud as it did, he had a talking-to and did it to save his job.”
Meanwhile, Carrie Ann is still feeling “like she’s walking on eggshells” and the insider says, “What Val said made it so she doesn’t know how to move forward after this. She stands by what she said to Jenna; she was being constructive. Making that kind of joke was a shock to Carrie Ann.”
Reminder: Val made an “Oscar Slap” reference in the aftermath of Carrie Ann criticizing Val’s wife Jenna Johnson for a rule-breaking lift. He’s since apologized, saying in part, “In a moment where my instinct was to defend my wife, 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. Carrie Ann certainly didn’t deserve to get caught in the middle of my bad judgement, and I hate that she was.”
Val added, “The last thing I want is to become a distraction from an important week or from the incredible work my dance partner Jenna Dewan is putting in. Please send Carrie Ann, Jenna, and the whole DWTS family lots of love during Dedication Night. I’ll be watching and cheering everyone on!”
