DWTS star Karamo Brown backtracks on relationship with Sean Spicer: 'There was no friendship'

Karamo Brown was on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live Tuesday night, and the Queer Eyestar didn’t hold back about his tenure on Dancing With the Stars.

Brown spoke about why fellow contestant Sean Spicer remains on the dancing competition despite being a “bad dancer,” before defending his cordial relationship with the controversial former White House press secretary. He also backtracked his previous comments about the two of them being friends.

First, Brown said he thought he was “robbed” after being eliminated from the dancing competition last week, despite receiving a solid combined score of 49. Meanwhile, Spicer has held the lowest score for the last five weeks but is still in the game.

“He can’t dance, that’s literally what it is,” Brown said, agreeing with host Andy Cohen’s opinion that Spicer is not so light on his feet. “But it’s also fan vote. And Middle America watches the show and they vote for him. And also our president, who should be doing other stuff, has been tweeting ‘vote for the man.'”

In August, after the DWTS lineup was announced, Brown caught flak when he called Spicer “a good guy” and said he hoped he could change the political aide’s perspective. Brown said that the public backlash was an overreaction, citing the fact that he had to deactivate his Twitter account due to death threats against his son.

“Because you were friends with Sean Spicer?” Cohen asked.

“Because I was nice to Sean Spicer. But there was no friendship,” Brown said. “I was just saying that, if we’re going to be on the same show, I’m going to have a respectful conversation with someone who’s different from me.”

He continued, “People were like, ‘How dare you? Oh my gosh.’ And I was like, if you’ve never seen me on television, I’m always going to be the person to build a bridge.”

Speaking to press after his elimination, Brown, in fact, did call Spicer a friend.

“Sean is literally someone who I would’ve never thought I could be friends with, and I’m going to walk away from here calling him a friend,” he said last Monday. “I’m going to continue the conversation that we’ve had outside of this.”

The Fab Five member, who is releasing a children’s book and can be seen in the special Queer Eye We’re in Japan!, called in to EW’s Eye on the Ball recap podcast last Tuesday. Brown said “I truly believed that I could reach Spicer,” and talked about the importance of Spicer’s emotional reaction to his elimination.

“I was very happy that Sean was crying at the end of it because, you know, what I do on Queer Eye is reach out to people who have different points of view and people who are different from me and help them to have emotional breakthroughs, help them to have growth,” Brown told EW.

Related content:

• Watch Queer Eye’s Fab Five become a boy band in We’re in Japan! sneak peek
• Karamo Brown sounds off on DWTS costar Sean Spicer: I ‘truly believed I could reach him’
• See Sean Spicer as Toy Story’s Woody and all the Disney-themed outfits from Dancing With the Stars