Dancing With the Stars season 23 certainly got off to a memorable start on Monday as two men rushed the stage to protest controversial swimmer Ryan Lochte. According to ABC, the two protestors were definitely gunning for Lochte, screaming “liar”, in reference to Lochte’s gas station incident in Rio de Janeiro during the Olympics.
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“An individual stormed the dance floor tonight and was immediately subdued and escorted out of the building”. A row of people wearing the anti-Lochte shirts could be seen in the back row, and they too were escorted from the studio.
The men were wearing anti-Lochte t-shirts when they took the stage Monday night.
“The suspects posed as audience members, then changed clothes to display anti-Lochte T-shirts to disrupt the show”, said Lopez, adding that both men had tickets and appeared to have planned the protest.
Sam Sotoodeh and Barzeen Soroudi were released from the Los Angeles Police Department Metropolitan Detention Center Tuesday at 11:00 a.m., with their bail set at $1,000 each.
“We are nothing if not a country of second acts and second chances”, Bergeron said.
Lochte joined “Dancing with the Stars” after becoming embroiled in an global controversy during the recent Summer Olympics, in which he and other Olympic swimmers fabricated being robbed at gunpoint in Rio, Brazil, during a night out.
The swimmer told Bergeron that “so many feelings are going through my head right now”. Instead, it was protestors rushing Ryan Lochte and Cheryl Burke while they were being critiqued that became the big news of the evening.
“It’s not uncommon for there to be a lot of noise here, a lot of cheering, a lot of jeering when people don’t like the judges” comments”, “DWTS” host Tom Bergeron said on “GMA’ today. Neither of the men made physical contact with Lochte and were taken by police to be booked on suspicion of trespassing.
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Recently, the International Olympic Committee, United States Olympic Committee and USA Swimming suspended Lochte for 10 months, leaving him unable to compete in next year’s world championship in Hungary.
