Showing his support! Karamo Brown gushed about how “amazing” James Van Der Beek and Kimberly Van Der Beek are for being so honest and open about their miscarriage.
“I was heartbroken for that,” the Queer Eye star, 39, told Us Weekly exclusively on Tuesday, December 3, while kicking off the Literacy Project Fundraiser with Pizza Hut and its nonprofit partner First Book. “But what I was proud of was James’ strength and his wife’s strength to be able to share their pain with the world because I know so many people who have experienced loss and the loss of a child. A lot of times, we feel like we need to hide that, so the fact that he was open to share that was pretty amazing.”
James, 42, competed alongside Brown on season 28 of Dancing With the Stars, and he announced that he and his wife, 37, had experienced a pregnancy loss on a November episode of the ABC show.
The Dawson’s Creek alum, who also shares Olivia, 9, Joshua, 7, Annable, 5, Emilia, 3, and Gwendolyn, 17 months, with the former business consultant, went on to write on Instagram: “Wrecked. Devastated. In shock. 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.”
Kimberly gave her followers an update on her recovery the following week, saying, “I’m healing. I am definitely healing. My biggest thing is my blood pressure. I just get very light-headed very easily so I can’t really get up and walk around for more than a couple minutes right now. A lot of blood transfusion action this weekend, so I’m just taking it super easy trying to restore and build my blood.”
James was eliminated the same week his miscarriage news broke, and Brown left the show three weeks earlier. “If I could rearrange things, I would have been in the finals, but that’s not how life works,” the reality star told Us of his elimination on Tuesday. “I’m just happy I had the experience and I went out like a champ.”
While competing on DWTS, Brown released his and his son’s book, I Am Perfectly Designed, which he read to students to kick off Pizza Hut and First Book’s Literary Project Fundraiser on “The truth of the matter is that a lot of kids don’t have access to diverse books, and when you don’t have access to diverse books you sometimes see the world in a very limited point of view,” he said. “So it’s beautiful that you can get books brought to kids that can show them that so much is possible in the world and that reading is fun.”
With reporting by Kayley Stumpe
