Anna Delvey’s one-word goodbye to Dancing with the Stars didn’t come as a surprise to her partner Ezra Sosa.
On the Sept. 24 episode of the ABC dance competition, host Julianne Hough asked the convicted con artist, 33, what she was taking away from her experience on the show after she was eliminated. Delvey bluntly replied with a one-word answer: "Nothing," she said.
Following the show, Sosa, 23, told Extra that Delvey’s parting words were anything but unexpected.
“I knew she was going to say something very iconic and something very ‘Anna Delvey’ with her exit,” he shared. “Of course she has to — it’s very typical. We would expect nothing less of her.”
However, the professional dancer revealed that Delvey apologized to him for ending his first season as a pro early.
"She honestly kept on apologizing to me,” he shared. “She felt super sorry that my first season was cut short."
He added that he wished the pair could have “stayed longer” in the competition, saying, "I honestly wanted to stay longer for my partner. I really wanted to give her a chance to really grow on camera and let America really see who she really is.”
Sosa also shared that he wants people to know “how incredibly sweet she is and how misunderstood she is.”
“I really tried my best to see her for the person she is outside the persona," he added.
As for the backlash that Delvey faced since being cast on the show, Sosa said, "Anna is a tough cookie, so seeing her in that state really shocked me and made me sad. In that moment, I just grabbed her hands and told her, ‘When you are in the competition with me, whatever you are going through, I am going through with you.’"
Ahead of the Sept. 24 episode of Dancing with the Stars, Sosa opened up about criticism in an emotional TikTok.
“I just want to come on here and just talk about my first official show as a professional dancer on Dancing with the Stars,” he shared. “What is life? I cannot believe this is happening to me right now.”
He called it the “best day ever” as he felt “so much love from literally every single person, including my partner.” However, he noted that Delvey did not feel the same support.
“On my end, I was feeling so much positivity,” he explained as he teared up. “On my partner's end, she wasn't receiving the same. I think the hardest part of my day after [the] press line, she was reading the comments and we couldn't find her. They finally found her in the bathroom. She was crying. I've never seen her like that, and it broke my heart.”
"As her partner, I wanted to give her the best experience she possibly could, and knowing that that's not the case, it really did break my heart,” he added.
Delvey, whose real name is Anna Sorokin, gained notoriety for posing as a wealthy German heiress and used her social standing to defraud wealthy people, banks and hotels. She was arrested in 2017 and convicted of grand larceny in the first, second and third degree as well as theft of services in 2019.
That May, Delvey was sentenced to four to 12 years in state prison (which was cut short when she was released in February 2021 for good behavior), fined $24,000, and ordered to pay restitution of about $199,000. She paid restitution to her victims using $320,000 she received from Netflix for rights to adapt her life story into a TV series (which was later titled Inventing Anna and released in 2022), Insider reported.
Shortly after her release, Delvey was taken into custody by ICE for violating the terms of her visa. She has been living under house arrest in New York City while fighting her deportation case.
“I know what she did was really controversial and was not right,” Sosa shared in his video. “I can never justify that for her and for anyone in her life, it's really hard for me, because this person that I'm truly just falling in love with every single day in rehearsal isn't the person that everyone sees in the media.”
“No one deserves the amount of hate that she's getting right now,” he continued. “She deserves a second chance. She has stepped up to the plate, and I just cannot wait for y'all to see how much she has improved, so tune in this next Tuesday. Dancing with the Stars, and I'll see you there.”
