Val Chmerkovskiy Joked About Slapping a 'DWTS' Judge for Criticizing His Wife — Then Apologized All Day

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape. It was Super Bowl Night in the Dancing with the Stars ballroom — the first one the show has ever staged — and Jenna Johnson and her partner Harry Shum Jr. had just finished a samba to Usher’s “Yeah!” when judge Carrie Ann Inaba stopped the party cold. There was a lift in the routine, Inaba said, and lifts are against the rules. Then she did the thing judges almost never do on live television: she read the definition of a lift out loud, from a sheet of paper, word for word, while the ballroom went quiet. She also told Johnson, a professional dancer, that she needed to put more content in her dances. Johnson answered on the spot — she had understood a lift to mean lifting your partner — and the exchange ended tense. Hold the temperature of that moment in your head, because everything that follows is one man deciding how to answer it.

Start with the part nobody wants to say out loud: the call was genuinely arguable, and dancers said so on the record. The moment Inaba flagged was not Johnson hoisting Shum — it was members of the troupe helping Shum through a backflip. Val’s own brother Maks Chmerkovskiy, a former pro on the show, argued on The Viall Files podcast, per USA Today, that the rulebook Inaba read governs a couple dancing, not extra dancers in the background, and told the judge to get some consistency. Maks’s wife Peta Murgatroyd, another former pro, said the rule would have confused her, too. Shum himself tried to lower the temperature, posting that everyone should take a deep breath and just enjoy being entertained, per USA Today. Translation: the defense of Jenna Johnson existed, it was evidence-based, and professionals were already making it out loud. The merits were sitting right there, gift-wrapped.

Val Chmerkovskiy did not make that argument. He went to TikTok instead, posting a line about how you almost saw the Fresh Prince enter the ballroom last night — then deleting it, per Page Six. Everybody who saw it did the same math instantly. The Fresh Prince is Will Smith, and the most famous thing Will Smith has done this decade is climb onstage at the 2022 Oscars and slap Chris Rock across the face over a joke about his wife — an act that got Smith banned from Academy events for ten years. So read the construction honestly: a judge criticized my wife, and I almost did the slap. Fans split on the spot — some heard a threat wearing a joke’s clothes, others insisted he only meant the famous line Smith shouted afterward and was simply standing up for his wife, per Page Six. But notice what both readings share. The reference point is a real open hand, on a real man’s face, in the most infamous moment in awards-show history.

The delete button did not outrun the post. On Thursday, Inaba saw it — Page Six brought it to her attention — and she answered publicly with one flat question: “So this is what we are doing now?” Hours later came the apology tour. In an Instagram Stories statement on Thursday, reported by USA Today and Just Jared, Chmerkovskiy apologized from the bottom of his heart for the post, said he had reached out to Carrie Ann to apologize directly and personally, and apologized publicly too, because he understood his words reach far beyond the show’s inner circle. He said he should never have made the reference and deeply regretted it, acknowledged that he is fortunate to hold a platform and is a role model to some, and promised to pause and think before posting from now on. He closed by saying he was truly sorry to Carrie Ann and to everyone hurt by what he called his careless post, and that he would do better. Inaba, for her part, had not publicly answered the apology in the coverage through Thursday, per Just Jared.

Now the fairness pass, because the Rewind grades the whole tape. Defending your wife is not the offense here — it is the most human impulse in the entire story, and half the ballroom thought her critique was shaky to begin with. Husbands are allowed to be mad. Pros are allowed to believe a judge blew a call. Maks made exactly that case the right way: loudly, specifically, on the merits, with his name attached and no delete button involved. What Val reached for instead was the nuclear reference — the one moment in modern entertainment where defending your wife curdled into actual violence, a moment its own author has spent years apologizing for. Borrowing that moment as a punchline does not defend Jenna Johnson. It takes her critique — an argument about a troupe-assisted backflip in a samba — and reframes it as a story about nearly slapping a judge. On a family show. Where, by his own apology’s admission, people look to him as a role model.

The verdict

So hand the verdict down with precision. It does not go to Jenna Johnson, who answered her critic face to face, in the room, like a professional. It does not go to Carrie Ann Inaba, who did the least glamorous part of a judge’s job — enforcing an unpopular rule in public — and then answered a slap joke with a single question. It does not even go to the apology, which, credit where due, was complete: private and public, no excuses stapled to it, and it named the exact standard he had failed. The verdict goes to the choice in between: a man holding a winnable argument, a famous name, and a phone, who skipped every good option on the table and posted the slap. Deleting it did not un-ring it, and he plainly knew it — that is why the apology took the whole day. Final score from the ballroom: the critique, debatable. The rebuttal, outta pocket.

THE VERDICT — After review: Val Chmerkovskiy is outta pocket.