Maura Higgins is clearing the air amid viral speculation suggesting that Dancing With the Stars is rigged to guarantee she waltzes away victorious.
“There was a rumor … [that] was all over the press that, like, seemingly ‘Dancing with the Stars is fixed for me to win,’” Higgins, 35, claimed on a recent episode of season 34 finalist Alix Earle’s eponymous YouTube series. “I was so tempted to comment on it and go, ‘Oh my God, does that mean I don’t actually have to learn any of the dances?’”
Higgins eventually talked herself out of publicly responding to the online allegations.
“I was like, ‘Don’t feed into it, Maura, because this is what you do,’” she quipped. “But, I wish that [rumor] is true!”
Higgins has consistently topped the leaderboard during the first four weeks of the hit ballroom dance competition, performing alongside her The Traitors season 4 costar Mark Ballas. The dancing duo even earned the season’s first 9 during the Tuesday, October 6, live broadcast.
“The 9 [score] means everything to me because, you know, I have to work extra hard. This dancing doesn’t come naturally to me,” Higgins exclusively told Us after her waltz to Mariah Carey’s “If It’s Over” earned a total score of 25 out of 30 from the judges. “I can be quite stiff, [and] I honestly do have such a good partner in Mark.”
She continued, “He’s so patient with me, and in the rehearsal room, like, we do put the work in, and I don’t shy away from hard work.”
While Higgins impressed the entire ballroom with her elegant routine, she admittedly “fell to the floor” in shock that it was so well-received.
“I cannot believe it, and I did not expect it one bit,” she mused on Tuesday. “I mean, it’s crazy, and it’s not me putting myself down, but there’s way better dancers in this competition. I genuinely feel like so many others should have got 9s. That’s wild, I’m so happy, and I have no words for it. … I’m so happy, and all I’m doing [is] my best.”
Ahead of the competition, Higgins had struggled with her self-confidence that Ballas, 40, has since helped her work through using “positive self-talk.”
“Any time I’m having self-doubt or being negative about myself, he’s like, ‘No, no, let’s try again,’” she explained. “It’s like anything, the more you do something, the better you get. We just persevere and persevere, and it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Like, the double turn in tonight’s dance. He was so close to taking that double turn out because we had our rehearsal yesterday and it didn’t go swimmingly great. When I did it [tonight], I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I did it’ in my head!”
Dancing With the Stars airs on ABC and Disney+ Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
