'Dancing With the Stars' Carrie Ann Inaba Defends Tyra Banks After Elimination Flub

Dancing With the Stars experienced a first during Monday’s Top 13 episode. As Tyra Banks began [...]

By Kyle Phillippi

Dancing With the Stars experienced a first during Monday's Top 13 episode. As Tyra Banks began to read off the names of pairs who were safe from elimination, she dwindled it down to what she thought was the last two couples whose fate would then be determined by the judges. That's when she and everyone else realized there were still three couple remaining, not two, to which Banks realized a mistake had been made.

After checking things over all while dealing with the time constraints of live television, Banks called Monica Aldama and her partner, Valentin Chmerkovskiy, back up to the stage after they had thought they were safe. It turns out they along with Anne Heche and Keo Motsepe were the actual two couples up for elimination. Heche and Motsepe were the third pair eliminated this season. The mistake created quite the stir at the moment and afterward across social media. On CBS' The Talk, Carrie Ann Inaba, one of the three judges on the program, wanted to clear Banks' name after she had been ridiculed on social media for messing things up.

"That was intense and we had never had anything like that happen," Inaba said. "I just want to clarify for everyone, everyone's blaming Tyra on social media. It was not Tyra's fault. She had the wrong names given to her at the beginning of the elimination round. It was a technical error in the booth about counting the votes." The judge went on to say that she "felt badly for all of them" especially considering the stressors that comes with an elimination. "We all just jumped in and I think Tyra did an amazing job handling a really intense live situation." She also said the show is working to make sure something like that never happens again.

While Inaba attempted to help clear Banks' name from the situation, Twitter was quick to call her out for the flub and continued to do so the following day. The mistake also didn't help Banks' case in her first season as host of the show, especially after the backlash that came her and the show's way for firing Tom Bergeron and Erin Andrews. Bergeron had held the position since the show's inception. Prior to hosting Dancing With the Stars, Banks had been a judge for America's Next Top Model and America's Got Talent.

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