Anne Heche and her Dancing With the Stars partner, Keo Motsepe, were eliminated from the dancing competition which aired last October 5.
The news came shortly after the actress talked about her struggles while she was still dating Ellen DeGeneres who was her girlfriend from 1997 to 2000. It was her first public relationship with a woman. She talked about their romance after her performance wherein she danced to Katy Perry’s “Rise”. Heche also didn’t do press after the elimination which is typical for the show’s contestants.
Heche revealed in a statement that she felt hurt for being eliminated after discussing something important. She explained, “The honest truth is that it took 20 years to process and share that story, so finally, telling it and being voted off on the same night was not the best feeling,” the 51-year-old explained to the outlet. “It did feel good to tell my story to show that we have come a long way, and we see things with more acceptance now—even though we are not all the way there yet, it’s important to recognize how far we have come.”
The actress also revealed that she was informed that in case she took Ellen as her date during the movie premiere of her movie Volcano, she would lose her contract with Fox.
She said, “I took Ellen to the premiere and I was ushered out by security before the movie even ended and was told I was not allowed to go to my own after-party for fear they would get pictures of me with a woman. I was in a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres for three and a half years and the stigma attached to that relationship was so bad that I was fired from my multimillion-dollar picture deal and I did not work in a studio picture for 10 years.”
It wasn’t only the most dramatic moment that night because host Tyra Banks made a mistake when she first informed competitors Monica Aldama and Val Chmerkovskiy that they were safe from being eliminated only to call them again because they were at the bottom two. Anyway, they didn’t go home that night.
