14 DAY TRIAL // The latest episode of Dancing With the Stars on ABC, where Rumer Willis is slowly but surely emerging as a potential winner, saw mother Demi Moore open up to the cameras on her divorce from second husband Bruce Willis.
The divorce was final in 2000 and marked the end of one of Hollywood’s golden couples. It took a serious toll on Rumer, who, soon after, started being bullied online for her looks, Demi revealed on the show, as the video below will confirm.
“There really was nothing I could do to stop it”
Rumer has spoken before of what bullying did to her in her younger years, and how it completely killed her self-esteem, making her wonder whether plastic surgery wouldn’t be a better option.
Demi’s intervention in the footage shown before Rumer’s Viennese Waltz aims to show that she wasn’t the only one affected: as a mother, Demi was powerless and could do nothing to protect her child from being hurt. She could only hope that it would end one day.
“When their father and I decided to divorce it probably had the biggest impact on her,” Demi says. “There really was not anything I could do to stop [the bullying], I mean, her self esteem was nothing, I could only just keep loving her and loving her until she could love herself.”
That would come later, after Rumer understood that she didn’t need public approval or support to be her own self.
Demi also spoke about her reaction to hearing that Rumer wanted to appear on Dancing With the Stars: apparently, she was against it, thinking perhaps that putting herself in the spotlight again would bring fresh criticism on her daughter.
Rumer wins over the American public
The exact opposite happened: by showing herself as a real person and thus becoming relatable even to those who, until recently, had criticized her for out of the ordinary looks, Rumer has managed to win over the American public.
Where her personality failed to touch viewers, her dancing did. Her progress on the show has been consistent and impressive at the same time, even earning her a perfect 10 on a recent edition.
For the Viennese Waltz (see the second video below), she and partner Val came close to another perfect 10 overall score by 2 points, but she earned very warm reviews for her technique on the dancefloor. The 2 adapted the Waltz to a “Fifty Shades of Grey” theme, to The Weeknd’s song from the OST.