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Dancing With The Stars’ Most Controversial Celeb Contestants

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Dancing With The Stars built its mirrorball trophy on ballroom skill, but its casting department built a second reputation entirely: turning scandal-scarred names into primetime redemption arcs.

ABC’s dance competition debuted in 2005 with a roster of mostly uncontroversial B-listers doing the cha-cha for a live studio audience. Thirty seasons later, the show has developed a well-worn playbook — cast the person the internet is already arguing about, let viewer voting keep them around longer than the judges would, and watch the ratings and outrage climb together. Some of the most talked-about seasons owe their headlines less to footwork than to who showed up on the ballroom floor in the first place.

• Ryan Lochte’s Season 23 premiere was interrupted when anti-Lochte protesters wearing crossed-out Lochte shirts rushed the stage while judge Carrie Ann Inaba was speaking, forcing security to intervene and the broadcast to cut to commercial.
• Sean Spicer advanced deep into Season 28 despite consistently low judge scores, propped up by organized viewer voting campaigns, and drew a public rebuke from host Tom Bergeron, who said he’d urged producers to avoid divisive political casting.
• Olivia Jade Giannulli joined the Season 30 cast in fall 2021 as the daughter of Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, both of whom had served prison time in the Operation Varsity Blues admissions scandal, sparking viewer backlash over rewarding the family with primetime exposure.

Lochtegate Comes To The Ballroom

Ryan Lochte joined Season 23 in 2016 just weeks after “Lochtegate,” the Rio Olympics incident in which the swimmer falsely claimed he and his U.S. teammates had been robbed at gunpoint. ABC cast him anyway, and the backlash arrived before he’d danced a single step. During the live season premiere, protesters wearing shirts with Lochte’s name crossed out stormed the ballroom stage mid-broadcast while Carrie Ann Inaba was mid-critique, prompting a security scramble and an abrupt cut to commercial — a moment that instantly became the story of the night, overshadowing the actual competition.

Sean Spicer’s Political Lightning Rod

Season 28’s casting of Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary, set off a different kind of backlash — one aimed squarely at the show’s judgment. Tom Bergeron, hosting at the time, said publicly he’d pushed producers to keep the ballroom free of polarizing political figures, a rare on-record break between a host and his own show’s booking decisions.

Spicer’s scores were consistently among the season’s lowest, but he kept surviving elimination anyway, propelled by viewer voting campaigns organized by supporters determined to keep him on air. His run became a running argument about whether the show’s audience-vote format was being used to override the judges’ table entirely.

Spicer’s scores stayed near the bottom of the leaderboard almost every week — and he kept dancing anyway.

Tonya Harding And Paula Deen’s Image Rehab

Season 26’s all-athletes mini-season brought in Tonya Harding, the former figure skater still infamous for the 1994 assault on rival Nancy Kerrigan, a case in which Harding pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution. Despite fierce viewer debate over whether she belonged on a family-friendly ratings vehicle, Harding made it all the way to the finals.

Paula Deen’s Season 21 casting in 2015 followed a similar template. The celebrity chef had lost her Food Network deal and multiple corporate sponsorships two years earlier after admitting in a deposition that she’d used racial slurs. DWTS put her on the ballroom floor anyway — a decision that, like Spicer’s and Harding’s, treated the show as a comeback stage as much as a competition. It’s the same reputation-repair-through-reality-TV instinct that’s shown up in other controversial celebrity moments that dominated headlines well beyond the ballroom.

Olivia Jade And The Varsity Blues Backlash

Season 30, airing in fall 2021, cast Olivia Jade Giannulli, daughter of Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli. Both parents had served prison time after their roles in the Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scandal — Loughlin and her husband paid to falsify their daughters’ athletic credentials to get them into USC. Some of the celebrities involved in similar cases ended up among the biggest celebrity prison sentences that were cut short, and critics argued Olivia Jade’s ballroom slot amounted to a primetime reward for a scandal her family was still living down.

None of that stopped ABC from booking her, and it hasn’t stopped viewers from arguing about it every week the season has aired. That’s the pattern the show keeps leaning on — cast the person already at the center of a news cycle, let the judges score the dancing, and let the audience vote decide how long the controversy stays on stage.