Usually you don't expect dance competitions to cover horrific real-life murder of children. But that's exactly what happened on Dance Moms. Dance Moms: A New Era garnered backlash after doing a routine on the disappearance and murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Although it's been decades, I don't think there's a cooling period on child murder.
During the episode "Glo Don't Give with Both Hands," Glo Hampton assigns a JonBenet routine to Ashlan. She has to portray the murdered six year old in a dance routine.
"I want you to know all about her, everything about her family, and everything about her tragic ending, okay?" she asks. Her mother then explains exactly what happened to Ramsey. She revealed that Ramsey was taken and murdered.
Ashlan said, "It's gonna be hard pulling off as like a beauty queen. But you're also gonna be pretending like you're strangled." She also later adds, "Oh my gosh, this is really not for me, but I'll do anything for the win."
The routine itself is pretty horrible. At the end of the dance routine, Ashlan pretends to strangle herself as she exits the stage. It left many viewers scratching their heads and wondering what Dance Moms was thinking. Just head over to this Reddit forum, and you'll see that viewers were shocked.
'Dance Moms' Garners Backlash
They found it distasteful.
One wrote, "It was extremely disturbing I feel with cases like Jonbenet and Gypsy Rose where the cases are incredibly public, several documentaries and movies made about them...people start to blur the lines and forget these are actual real life children. I think a dance about Jonbenet could never truly be done in taste. Simply because there is no happy ending, it's just emphasizing a horrific murder of a child. They could've easily done a beauty pageant routine without exploiting Jonbenets murder."
Another wrote, "I think it was in super poor taste and also somehow had literally nothing to do with the case at all. They could have made it about pageant kids in general. I think it was said just to drum up controversy in the same way that Electricity dance done in like rural Pennsylvania did in season 1 of the OG."
Yet another wrote, "The worst part to me was Ashlan's mom sharing the entire story with her. It clearly upset her. I couldn't believe how much Ashlan looked like Jon Benet."
