‘Dancing With the Stars’: Tyra Banks Addresses Bottom Two Mistake From Last Episode to Kick Off ’80s Night

Dancing With the Stars is flash dancing its way into the ’80s this week. While the night is focused on the various couples’ ’80s-centric routines, host Tyra Banks began the episode by addressing last week’s awkward bottom two mixup. At the start of the episode, Banks assured fans that the results were indeed correct, but that a technical error led to the host reading off the wrong names off of her cue card.

On the Oct. 5 episode, Banks, as usual, announced which couples were safe while announcing the results. She incorrectly said that Cheer star Monica Aldama was safe when the Netflix personality was actually in the bottom two. As a result, Aldama and her partner, Val Chmerkovskiy, later had to be called back to the stage. Aldama was in the bottom two alongside actor Anne Heche and her partner, Keo Motsepe, who were ultimately sent home. Before the celebrities could take on their ’80s routines, Banks addressed this bottom two mistake by letting viewers know that a technical error caused the awkward situation.

“Speaking of voting, we want to clear up something that happened last week while we were announcing the results,” Banks began at the top of the hour. “Make no mistake, all your votes were definitely counted, and the correct bottom two couples were named. However, what you did no see was that there was a technical issue behind-the-scenes that caused the names on my cards to be listed incorrectly.” Even though the situation proved to be a bit of an awkward one, Banks’ statement made it clear that the couples who found themselves in the bottom two were indeed meant to be in their positions.

Following the episode, a source told Page Six that Heche, who ended up going home, was reportedly “furious” about the turn of events. She later released a statement to the publication. She noted that she wasn’t thrilled to be going home after sharing an emotional story concerning her previous relationship with Ellen DeGeneres during the episode. “The honest truth is that it took 20 years to process and share that story, so finally, telling it and being voted off on the same night was not the best feeling,” Heche said in a follow-up statement to Page Six. “It did feel good to tell my story to show that we have come a long way, and we see things with more acceptance now — even though we are not all the way there yet, it’s important to recognize how far we have come.”