• The Dancing With the Stars finale included a tense moment when judge Carrie Ann Inaba reacted to a heckler in the audience.
  • Co-host Alfonso Ribeiro quickly stepped in to defuse the moment and redirect the show.
  • Carrie Ann has faced fan criticism this season for supposedly biased judging, and she even recently admitted that she critiques women more harshly.

And so ends another season of Dancing With the Stars...and it wouldn’t be a DWTS live finale without some drama, right?? One of the most talked-about moments of the night: that tense exchange between judge Carrie Ann Inaba and a heckler from the audience, who apparently wasn’t pleased with the feedback Carrie Ann gave finalist Jordan Chiles and her partner, Ezra Sosa. Sure, co-host Alfonso Ribeiro did a pretty good job of diffusing the tension, but it was still...awkward.

Here’s what went down: After Carrie Ann told Jordan and Ezra that the beginning of their paso doble to Rihanna’s “Breakin’ Dishes” felt like “it didn’t quite come together,” an audience member interrupted to (seemingly) call Jordan a “queen” from across the ballroom. And that’s when Carrie Ann stood up from her seat and snapped, “What? What did you say?” See the tense moment for yourself:

That’s when Alfonso jumped in to move things along to Derek Hough, saying, “All right, all right, don’t worry about that—Derek, you’re up,” but it still took the ballroom a minute to recover from Carrie Ann’s surprising response.

To be fair, Carrie Ann has come under fire several times this season for what some fans believe to be biased critiques, which is why she likely reached her breaking point. During a recent interview with Variety, she even admitted that she does judge the female DWTS competitors more harshly than the men, but only because “I understand what it is to be a woman, so I can get into more detail about what I’m seeing.”

She continued, “None of us are ever 100 percent right. But I’m willing to risk that and speak to them so that they have the opportunity to grow. And when I speak woman to woman, I’m maybe a bit more frank. Maybe because I feel like women are tougher than men in some ways.”

She’s not wrong, IMO!