Hannah Brown felt empty after winning Dancing With the Stars: 'It actually carried no weight'

Hannah Brown says it was when she was on top of the world that she felt the worst.

The Bachelor and Bachelorette star confessed that the public adulation she received around the time she won season 28 of Dancing With the Stars in 2019 was "jarring," as it prompted her to realize, "'Oh wait, I'm supposed to feel something different.'"

Brown reflected on the June 18 episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show that "the biggest moment that I had with that was when I did win Dancing with the Stars. I had gone straight from Bachelor, Bachelorette, [to] Dancing with the Stars, and my life changed overnight. I lived in a small town in Alabama, hadn't lived more than 15 minutes away from my parents' home where I grew up, and then I had all these amazing opportunities, and yet I was so lost and felt so lonely."

Born in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in 1994, Brown was no stranger to show business when she was cast on season 23 of The Bachelor in 2018. She had been competing in pageants and winning titles since she was 15. But going straight from the high-exposure dating series into headlining her own season of The Bachelorette, then on to Dancing With the Stars in under two years threw her for a loop.

"Everybody loved me and everybody thought I was killing it, and I was showing up week after week on live television and getting through these performances, but I just felt like I had to win to prove that everything that I had done had been worth it," she explained.

Casting her mind back to winning the Mirrorball trophy with partner Alan Bersten, Brown reflected, "When I went to hold up that Mirrorball. It was way lighter than I thought it was going to be. I remember going back home after the whole show because it was like during the holidays, and I went home for Thanksgiving, and I wrote in my journal, 'I'm just having the weirdest feeling. I feel so empty.' It was like, the way I thought that this trophy in this moment was going to feel so big. But instead it felt so light. It actually carried no weight."

Brown said that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic shortly after her win and the wave of lockdowns that resulted forced her into a period of contemplation that eventually set her on a course toward greater mental wellness. But she isn't alone in expressing some negative feelings over her DWTS experience.

Fraudster and faux heiress Anna Delvey ignited backlash when she said she would take "nothing" away from her experience on season 33 after being eliminated, and later suggested that the long-running ABC series had used her to "drive up the ratings."

Brown's fellow Bachelorette, Charity Lawson, said she "went through hell and back with my mental health on that show" in 2024 after competing on season 32. The O.C. star Mischa Barton flat out said her time on season 22 of Dancing With the Stars was "awful." She explained in 2016, "I had no idea it would be so bad. I got told off by my dancer... I was supposed to control the costumes, I was told that I could do the design aspect of it, that's kind of the reason why I agreed to do it."

But that isn't what happened. "It wasn't collaborative like a choreographer on a film set... I was so confused by it. It was like The Hunger Games. It was all a popularity contest. It was awful. I was so glad to get kicked off."