The Bachelor Nation star reflects on the emotional toll her time on 'Dancing With the Stars' took on her mental health.
Charity Lawson's experience on Dancing With the Stars was a challenge.
The Bachelorette star was a guest on Cheryl Burke's Sex, Lies and Spray Tans podcast, and spoke candidly about the toll that bullying took on her during her time on season 32.
Lawson, who was paired with Artem Chigvintsev on the show, said that she was met with hate on her personal social media accounts as well as that of the official DWTS social media pages from people attacking her for simply just "existing."
Noting that she came from the Bachelor Nation fanbase which was a bit more "conservative," it was jarring to see the DWTS fans' reactions.
"I think to a certain degree it was expected," Lawson said. "I came into the Dancing With the Stars fanbase like, 'This is going to be a piece of cake,' only to be… almost to the point where it was so much worse than Bachelor and Bachelorette."
Lawson said the comments she saw consisted of viewers calling her out for "being entitled, for being the biggest b***h on the cast. It's crazy."
Lawson, who is a therapist, became overcome with emotion as she explained to Burke, a former DWTS pro, that this was the first time she was speaking out about the negativity and the bullying publicly.
"I never talked about it because I had to choose to protect my peace and not give any attention to this," she said. "It was so damaging, night in, night out. The pros didn't know, nobody knew what was going on."
She added, "I just had to suppress it and it got to the point where I was like, I'm just trying to survive. I'm just trying to make it out of the season."
Lawson said that she told the executives and Chigvintsev about what was going on, but by the time she informed them, it was too late. So she learned to push through. According to Lawson, the most troubling trend was realizing that her race played a factor.
"That's why I said it's not really surprising," she added. "Because someone messaged me and said the same thing happened to Simone [Biles] when she competed and I was like it's just honestly a trend which is kinda frustrating. The difference that I have to go through this life as a Black woman and being on a reality TV show. It's like the same things are just not protected."
Lawson hopes that speaking out about her experience helps others who may find themselves in the same situation when competing on the reality series.
"I am only advocating for that and speaking about that, because I'm like god forbid someone else has to go through this and they're stuck in that rut," she said. "It's a really dark place."
Lawson added that she's "grateful that I stuck it out."
One person that she had on her side was her fiancé, Dotun Olubeko, who encouraged her to keep going on DWTS, despite all of the negative remarks.
"I'm very secure in myself and very secure in the man that I chose and I know how he's going to react to this," she said. "So we talked about it a lot, I don't want to sacrifice what we built. If it's going to create this fury or distance between us, I don't want that and again he was just encouraging me. He was like, 'This is something I know you want to do. You need to do it. I'm gonna be here, don't worry.'"
Lawson finished in fourth place during the season 32 DWTS finale.
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