James Van Der Beek is healing with the help of his wife! Following her miscarriage, Kimberly Van Der Beek urged the Dancing With the Stars season 28 contestant to continue competing.
“His strength is Kimberly,” James’ partner, Emma Slater, told Us Weekly and other reporters at the Monday, November 18, episode of the ABC show. “She is the most inspirational, strongest, most high-spirited person I know, and she was basically not having it, that he was going to stay at home. She was making sure she was pushing him out the door. He has just been torn lately with what has happened, his personal tragedy, and she really is the person who says, ‘I need you go to there and dance and show everybody how great you are and shine.’ And that’s what he did tonight.”
Although the Dawson’s Creek alum, 42, was cut from DWTS on Monday, Slater, 30, told Us that he was “grateful” to have dancing as an outlet. After his elimination, James told the pro: “I can throw myself into a form of physical expression. I need that engine to keep me going, and I need to feel a little bit normal and not have time to fall into a pit.”
Because the actor is “an extremely smart, level-headed man [with a] good head on his shoulders,” Slater believes he will recover. “He’s not one to get defeated,” the English dancer explained.
James opened up about Kimberly’s pregnancy loss on Monday’s episode, and he took to Instagram later that night to share more of their tragedy. “Wrecked. Devastated. In shock,” the Varsity Blues star captioned a photo of his wife and one of their daughters in the hospital. “That’s how we’re feeling right now after the soul we thought were going to welcome into our family in April… has taken a short cut to whatever lies beyond this life. We’ve been through this before, but never this late in the pregnancy, and never accompanied by such a scary, horrific threat to @vanderkimberly and her well-being. Grateful that she’s now recovering, but we’ve only just begun unpacking the layers of this one.”
The former business consultant, 37, has previously suffered three miscarriages. She revealed the “devastating” losses in September 2018.
Kimberly and James wed in August 2010 and share Olivia, 9, Joshua, 7, Annabel, 5, Emilia, 3, and Gwendolyn, 17 months.
Dancing With the Stars airs on ABC Mondays at 8 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Kayley Stumpe
