Soccer star Hope Solo writes in her new memoir that professional dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy, her partner on Dancing with the Stars, got physical with her, and once “slapped” her “hard” on the face during a Season 11 rehearsal.
Coincidentally, Maks tweeted, “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.”
In Solo: A Memoir of Hope, the Olympian claimed Maks was physical with her earlier in the season. She writes, “He manhandled me in rehearsals from the start, pushing me, whacking my stomach, bending my arms roughly. I thought that was just how it went – how dancers worked with each other. But it kept getting worse. 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.”
As for the alleged “hard” slap incident, Hope claimed after it allegedly happened that ABC gave her the opportunity to continue on the show with a different partner.
She writes, “I didn’t want to end Maks’s career,” adding that she felt the “tabloids” would spin the partner change to make her look like a “prima donna.”
