Former “Bachelorette” and “Bachelor” star Hannah Brown has confessed that she didn’t feel anything special after winning Dancing with the Stars Season 28.
While appearing on ‘The Jamie Kern Lima Show’ that aired June 18, she revealed that holding the Mirrorball Trophy sensed an emotional void. It surprisingly prompted her to think, “Oh wait, I’m supposed to feel something different.”
Brown expressed on the show that “the biggest moment that I had with that was when I did win Dancing with the Stars. I had gone straight from Bachelor, Bachelorette, [to] Dancing with the Stars, and my life changed overnight. I lived in a small town in Alabama, hadn’t lived more than 15 minutes away from my parents’ home where I grew up, and then I had all these amazing opportunities, and yet I was so lost and felt so lonely.”
Hannah Brown (born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1994) was already in the public eye when she was cast on ‘The Bachelor’ in 2018. Since she was just 15, she had been proactively competing in beauty pageants and winning several titles. From being a contestant on the dating series to headlining The Bachelorette and later on joining DWTS, Brown’s life changed within only 2 years. The sudden rise in fame made her feel chaotic and off-balance.
“Everybody loved me and everybody thought I was killing it, and I was showing up week after week on live television and getting through these performances, but I just felt like I had to win to prove that everything that I had done had been worth it,” she said.
Thinking back to the winning moment with her partner Alan Bersten, she expressed, “When I went to hold up that Mirrorball. It was way lighter than I thought it was going to be. I remember going back home after the whole show because it was like during the holidays, and I went home for Thanksgiving, and I wrote in my journal, ‘I’m just having the weirdest feeling. I feel so empty.’ It was like, the way I thought that this trophy in this moment was going to feel so big. But instead it felt so light. It actually carried no weight.”
Brown said that the outbreak of COVID-19 and the lockdown’s isolation turned into a period of reset. The break gave her time to rebuild her mental health. Well, she is not the only person who had disclosed negative feelings about the DWTS experience. Brown’s fellow Bachelorette, Charity Lawson, who was her fellow Bachelorette, also expressed that she “went through hell and back with my mental health on that show” during season 32 in 2024.
Mischa Barton, popular for her role in The O.C., also had an awful experience on Season 22 of DWTS. She expressed her feelings in 2016, “I had no idea it would be so bad. I got told off by my dancer… I was supposed to control the costumes, I was told that I could do the design aspect of it, that’s kind of the reason why I agreed to do it.”
DWTS didn’t meet her personal expectations. “It wasn’t collaborative like a choreographer on a film set… I was so confused by it. It was like The Hunger Games. It was all a popularity contest. It was awful. I was so glad to get kicked off.”
