Over a decade after her third place run on Dancing with the Stars, Bristol Palin is spilling on her experience.
On Monday’s (Aug. 26) episode of Cheryl Burke‘s Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans podcast, Palin, who competed alongside Mark Ballas, was asked “who would roll their eyes” at her and her partner Mark Ballas whenever they were “saved during elimination,” per Entertainment Weekly.
“Oh, Maks?” she recalled, referring to Maksim Chmerkovskiy. “Oh, he hated me so much.”
As for why he “hated” her, Palin wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know,” she surmised. “Probably just because we kept going through. I mean, he was real nice at the beginning.”
Chmerkovskiy competed with singer-songwriter and actress Brandy in Season 11, which aired in 2010. The pair came in fourth place behind Bristol and Ballas, despite Bristol and Ballas receiving lower scores over the course of the season, per The Daily Mail. Nonetheless, Bristol highlighted that she “definitely felt the tension” from Chmerkovskiy.
“I forgot about that. Yeah. Because the further we went along in it, the more it was like, ‘Oh gosh, OK,’” she added.
Earlier on in the podcast, Sarah Palin‘s daughter assured Burke that she and “a lot of the people were very sweet and very kind.”
A representative for the pro dancer insisted to EW that “Maks doesn’t hate anybody.”
“For [Palin] to say that would be a mischaracterization of his feelings,” they added. “I think he and everyone else in America, 14 years ago, thought that he and Brandy were on their way to winning that year, if not coming into the finals. So there was a bit of disappointment when she leapfrogged him into the finals. It’s a competition. He’s very competitive and took it seriously.”
Chmerkovskiy previously rehashed a spat of his with former partner Kirstie Alley, which spurred after she claimed he was “flirty.”
“Kirstie Alley famously told me in rehearsal, she’s like, ‘You’re so flirty,’” Chmerkovskiy recalled in an episode of Getting Grilled with Curtis Stone this past spring . “Flirty? I’m having a heart attack, because I don’t know what else to do. How to figure this out. She’s like, ‘You’re so flirty.’”
