‘Dancing With the Stars’ Alum Shares Why He Thinks the Show Is ‘Rigged’

Antonio Sabàto Jr. is speaking out about his experience with Dancing With the Stars Season 19, telling his former pro partner Cheryl Burke he felt like the experience was “rigged” in a new appearance on her Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans podcast. 

The actor and model, who competed with Burke on the ABC dance competition in 2014, told Burke bluntly in the Sept. 23 episode, “To be honest, I think that that the show is partly rigged in a sense. Yeah. It is rigged.” He explained that he felt celebrities who come into the competition with a dancing background have an unfair advantage. 

“It’s rigged in this way,” he continued. “First of all, if you’re not a dancer or you don’t have dancing skills from a young age, you’re not going to win. I think that somebody who’s never danced – because the whole premise of the show would be celebrities who’s never danced – but the majority of winners are dancers.”

Burke pointed out that she won Season 3 with former NFL star Emmitt Smith, who had never danced before coming on Dancing With the Stars, but Sabàto protested, “Yeah, but he had moves. He had soul. He was dancing at church, you know what I mean? He had that thing going.”

He added that current DWTS co-host Alfonso Ribeiro, who won Season 19, was “tap-dancing with Michael Jackson,” complaining, “It’s like me racing my whole life of professional cars, and you just raced in a track, I’m going to beat you every time.”

Sabàto also said he didn’t like the show’s focus on the contestants’ narratives. “The judges, they know who they want, so you’ve got to keep that persona,” he said. “Like, you’ve got to keep the momentum of what’s going on in your private life. But I was surprised, sometimes you see people who have a huge following. But you’ve got to have personality. There’s just a lot of things that they want, that the show wants. Because it is entertainment and they need to keep the stories going, but you do have to learn the numbers. And when it starts happening where you have to learn two numbers a week, you’ve got to know what you’re doing, man.”

Burke then pushed back that Sabàto was also hosting Fix It & Finish It while competing on DWTS, and Sabàto admitted that he might have gone further than eighth place if he had more time and energy for dancing. “If I didn’t have another job and we were just in Hollywood and me driving five minutes, and we had all the time in the world and also the time in the world to relax in moments where you’re not traveling instead of taking red-eyes every single week, I think I would’ve probably lasted at least another week or two,” he said. “If we would have been free of all the other craziness, I would have had a chance of winning it.”