How she coped. Peta Murgatroyd suffered one of her miscarriages while working on Dancing With the Stars, and now she’s opening up about how it affected her work.
“My last season that I was on there was [with] Vernon Davis, and that’s when my first miscarriage happened,” the ballroom pro, 35, exclusively told Us Weekly on Monday, June 27. “I feel it just kind of dampened the show for me just a little bit, and it kind of just put a dark cloud over everything.”
The New Zealand native and the former NFL player, 38, were eliminated fifth in season 29 of the ABC series, which premiered in September 2020. Murgatroyd now attributes her disappointing finish to what was happening in her personal life at the time.
“I felt I just didn’t have the best season that season because of everything,” she told Us.
The Peta Jane Beauty founder hasn’t returned to DWTS since then, but she hasn’t ruled it out — and she would do it while pregnant.
“I was nine weeks pregnant when I won with Nyle [DiMarco],” Murgatroyd said, referring to her season 22 win, which aired in 2016. “I was extremely tired, but I was fine. I wasn’t, like, nauseous or anything, so I would totally do it.”
The choreographer, who shares son Shai, 5, with husband Maksim Chmerkovskiy, recently revealed that she suffered three miscarriages in two years, with the most recent happening in October 2021. Her first pregnancy loss, which occurred in 2020, happened while she was shopping at Whole Foods.
“I was sitting in the bathroom sobbing. I’m surprised nobody walked in because I was crying so heavily and wailing, one of those deep cries,” she told People earlier this month. “That was something that will probably live with me for the rest of my life, being on that toilet by myself, knowing what was happening and not being able to stop it.”
Murgatroyd and the Ukraine native, 42, are now using in vitro fertilization to try to conceive another child. The Burn the Floor star has been open about the process on social media, sharing her experiences with IVF injections in Instagram posts.
“I feel really hopeful,” the dancer told Us of the process. “We had a lot of follicles and a lot of eggs retrieved, so I’m crossing my fingers. I would love two good ones.”
Does that mean she and Chmerkovskiy are hoping for twins? “Maybe. I’m still discussing that with Maks,” she told Us. “That’s a huge difference. Huge!”
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
