Hilaria Baldwin's Dancing With The Stars “sabotage” is the low-stakes gossip we need before the weekend

Dear Gossips,

Say what you will about Hilaria Baldwin, she is good for gossip. Case in point, this week she delivered some good old-fashioned low-stakes gossip after she was eliminated from Dancing with the Stars, which she calls “sabotage”. Escandalo!

The story originated on British gossip columnist Rob Shuter’s Substack, where he writes that sources told him that Baldwin “thought she was a frontrunner” and that she “blamed Alec’s friends for not voting”. I don’t even really care about the gossip hygiene on this one because it’s so far down the list of stuff that matters, and more, it’s just f-cking funny. I have zero issues believing Hilaria Baldwin thought she was in it to win it only to get booted in week 3. (I do, however, have extreme difficulty believing any of Alec Baldwin’s friends care about this sh-t.)

I also don’t have a hard time buying into the sabotage narrative because Hilaria was undone on camera after being eliminated.

Girl, it’s a dance show. Also, is she backing out of her Spanish accent? She used to struggle to pronounce “cucumber” (lol forever), but here she almost sounds like the Boston girl she is.

The “sabotage” is allegedly that DWTS producers “gave her the wrong music and choreography” and that it “wasn’t Disney enough”. The theme was “Disney week”, marking Disneyland’s 70th anniversary year, and Hilaria and her partner, professional dancer Gleb Savchenko, danced a quick step to the Cantina Band song from Star Wars. That is an instantly recognizable, iconic piece of music, and to my untrained eye, the dance is fun and peppy, matching the up-tempo music.

Not Disney enough? Baby, you’re not well-liked enough. Any reality competition show is a popularity contest to some extent, it’s one big high school talent show. Just look at who is still in the mix—two Mormon wives (super popular); Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles (beloved); Alix Earle and Dylan Efron (influencers); actresses Elaine Hendrix and Danielle Fishel (Millennial nostalgia); Andy Richter (beloved); Robert Irwin (beloved); and a guy from Pentatonix who according to my numberless math will be eliminated next.

People are voting on vibes, and Hilaria Baldwin’s vibes have always been bad, that’s the only sabotage here. Like of course Andy Richter is still in it, people love him, enough that I bet he stays on the show a little longer. And Robert Irwin, son of the late Steve Irwin, has the world’s heart forever, not only for his very public loss but also for passionately continuing his father’s conservationist message (Bindi Irwin gets the same grace). Also, did we know Robert Irwin is hot?

The negative reporting on Hilaria’s DWTS stint comes from deeply suspicious sources, but at the same time…she WAS literally dancing in the streets to promote her appearance on the show. I get it, we live in an attention economy, and she isn’t really famous on her own—which is allegedly one of the problems, she saw this as her “time to shine” away from Alec Baldwin’s “shadow”—but that also makes it easier to believe she was making “diva demands” and was, somehow, blindsided by being eliminated from a reality show.

Hilaria will be okay, she’s already back to “mommying”:

Like I said, low-stakes gossip. Just what we need before the weekend. Gracias, Hilaria!

Live long and gossip,

Sarah