When Maks Chmerkovskiy and Hope Solo were partnered on Dancing With The Stars 13 last year, there was a rehearsal clip that showed Maks shoving Hope. But now the Olympic soccer star claims, in a new memoir, Solo: A Memoir of Hope, that Maks did much more than that. VIA USAToday.
“He was often nasty,” she writes, “swearing at me and being harshly critical… I didn’t like being treated like that, but I could take it.”
She continues: “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. I was tough. I could take it.
“But it kept getting worse,” Hope continued. “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.”
She writes again that she “could tough it out.”
During the rehearsal we show, she writes, “Maks was rough and mean with me, flinging me and pushing me around. I could see the shocked looks on the faces of the other dances. So maybe this isn’t normal behavior, I thought.” Derek Hough, she writes, stepped in to work with her for the rest of the day.
During a different rehearsal, Hope writes that Maks was so angry with her at one moment during a rehearsal for the Halloween show that he slapped her. “He wanted my head in a specific position. To achieve that, he slapped me across the face. Hard.”
She adds that “he was extremely apologetic,” and ABC offered her a new partner after the incident, but she declined.
“I didn’t want to end Maks’ career,” she says, and feared she would come off looking like a “prima donna.” The slap was caught on camera and shown to Maks, but later disappeared, she writes.
Maks hasn’t officially addressed the allegations, but he 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…”
And Kirstie Alley, who danced with Maks during Season 12 and is set to dance with him as an All-Star in September tweeted: “I shall bite thine tongue, lest I get into a girl fight that I would surely lose without a hammer in my hand…;)… ouch! bloody tongue.”
Sources close to Maks tell TMZ that Maks was absolutely shocked when he heard about the “completely false” story and that “he has no idea why Hope would publish such a false and defamatory statement and doesn’t know why she would have such ill will towards him … especially because they’ve had dinner several times since the show ended.”
