‘Dancing with the Stars’ pro Ezra Sosa speaks out in defense of Anna Delvey

Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, was paired with “Dancing with the Stars” pro Ezra Sosa for Season 33 of the dance competition show.
Sosa, a first time pro on the show and a Utah native, has spoken out in defense of Delvey, saying she doesn’t deserve all the hate she received for being cast and then being eliminated during the show’s second week.
Delvey is a convicted con artist who presented herself an heiress and scammed multiple businesses and people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, per NBC News.
She was convicted in 2019 and released from prison in 2021. Delvey also spent time in an immigration detention facility and has been on house arrest ever since her release on bail in 2022.
To be allowed to go on “Dancing with the Stars,” Delvey was required to wear an ankle monitor while on the show. Her and Sosa bedazzled the ankle monitor to match their performance outfits.
The casting of Delvey on the show was met with controversy, and both the show and Delvey herself received backlash for the fact that she was allowed to compete.
Last week, before the second episode of “Dancing with the Stars” Season 33, Sosa took to TikTok and Instagram posting a video sharing his experience immediately after the season’s premiere episode.
In the video, Sosa talked about how he received so much love and positive feedback from everyone after the first episode, but the opposite was true for his partner Delvey.
After the show was over Delvey disappeared but was eventually found crying in the bathroom. She was upset over all the hate she had been receiving for her appearance on the show.
Sosa talked about his partnership with Delvey, defending her and the person she is.
“It’s hard because this person I’ve just fallen in love with every single day in rehearsal isn’t the person that everyone sees in the media”
As he spoke, Sosa got emotional and began to tear up.
“No one deserves the amount of hate that she is getting right now. She deserves a second chance,” Sosa said.
During last week’s episode of “Dancing with the Stars” when Delvey and Sosa were eliminated, one of the show’s hosts, Julianne Hough, asked Delvey “What are you going to take away from this competition?”
Delvey responded with “Nothing”.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Sosa shared his thoughts on Delvey’s final words on the show.
“When we were eliminated, I could tell from the jump just staring at her face, she was a little upset about it,” Sosa said to Entertainment Weekly. “So I was like, ‘She’s going to go off on Julianne, I can see it happening.’ But when she said, ‘Nothing,’ I was like, ‘I’ll take it, this is good.’ It was so iconic though.”
Sosa said even though he was eliminated early in the season he is “feeling really good” about the experience. He laughed as he said his favorite memory of the season is that he was able to teach a convicted felon how to dance.
“I really tried my best just to see her for the person she was, not for her controversy, and just really help her see that she wasn’t alone going through this” Sosa said.
Sosa also made a TikTok using the sound of Delvey’s iconic “nothing” on the show.
After her elimination Delvey joined fellow “Dancing with the Stars” contestant Tori Spelling on the podcast “misSPELLING” where she talked about her iconic final word on the show, per Entertainment Weekly.
Delvey said she meant it when she said she took away nothing from the show. She spoke about how she tried to apply what the judges and others on the show told her to do.
“You guys told me what I’m supposed to do. I tried to do it, and then I still was rejected,” Delvey said on the “misSPELLING” podcast. “I’m taking away nothing. This is what I’m taking away from it, because your advice was worthless. The advice did not pay off for me, even though I tried to follow it.”
Following her elimination from “Dancing with the Stars” Delvey spoke with NBC News about her experience and the backlash she received after being announced as part of the cast.
“I feel that the show so obviously used me to drive up the ratings, that they never had any plans to give me any chance to grow and only cared about exploiting me for attention,” she wrote in an email to NBC News. “It was predatory of them to try to make me feel inadequate and stupid all while I did get progressively better yet they chose to disregard that.”
Delvey and Sosa were eliminated after performing a quickstep to “Suddenly I see” by KT Tunstall, which received a score of 17 out of 30. On the first week of competition the pair received an 18 out of 30 for their cha-cha to “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter.
“It felt like I was never really given a fair chance by the viewers or some of the judges’ given their nonsensical scoring,” Delvey wrote to NBC News. “It’s supposed to be a dance competition and not a popularity contest.”
On “misSPELLING,” Delvey said the show “felt like a waste of time,” per Entertainment Weekly.