Soccer star Hope Solo has made a jaw-dropping claim in her new memoir about her season 13 “Dancing with the Stars” partner, Maksim Chmerkovskiy.
“He manhandled me in rehearsals from the start, pushing me, whacking my stomach, bending my arms roughly,” she writes in “Solo: A Memoir of Hope.” “I thought that was just how it went — how dancers worked with each other.”
SOLO STANDS FIRM ON CHASTAIN COMMENTS
“But it kept getting worse,” she continues about the professional dancer. “One day, Maks was trying to put me in a certain position and hit my stomach so hard with his open palm that I had a red handprint there for the rest of the day.”
USA Today reports that Chmerkovskiy slapped her face during rehearsal for the 2011 Halloween epidsode: “He wanted my head in a specific position. To achieve that, he slapped me across the face. Hard.”
The goalie, who made the gold medal save for the U.S. women’s soccer team at the London 2012 Olympics, claims that after the incident ABC allowed her to switch partners, but she stayed with Chmerkovskiy so she wouldn’t “end [his] career.”
No response from Chmerkovskiy yet, but he tweeted yesterday, “Always hated hypocrites and liars, but when someone is both and an opportunist, I just feel bad for them. Can’t win at someone’s expense.”
He also wrote, “Life’s best lessons are the ones that you smile through…..while they hurt you the most! I’m bullet proof….FIRE AWAY!