Why Is the ‘tWitch’ Family Fighting?

This week, dancer Allison Holker opened up about losing her husband, Stephen “tWitch” Boss, to suicide in 2022 in an interview with People. While promoting her forthcoming memoir, she shared intimate details, including a claim that she found drugs in his closet shortly after his death. The interview prompted a swift wave of backlash and accusations from Boss’s friends and family, revealing what seems to be a long-simmering conflict. Here’s what’s happened so far.

Boss died by suicide in 2022.

Boss and Holker met as co-competitors on the set of So You Think You Can Dance in 2010. They got married three years later, shortly before Boss began an eight-year stretch DJing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, while Holker appeared on a few seasons of Dancing With the Stars. They shared three children — Weslie, now 16, Holker’s daughter from a previous relationship who was adopted by Boss; Maddox, 8; and Zaia, 5 — and often made red-carpet appearances as a family.

In 2022, the couple posted about their nine-year wedding anniversary a few days before Boss died by suicide. He was 40.

Holker is speaking publicly about Boss’s struggles.

This week, People published an interview with Holker, whose upcoming memoir, This Far, recounts her grief following Boss’s death. During the interview, Holker shared a few revealing memories from the days after her husband’s death, including uncovering a “cornucopia” of drugs in his shoeboxes and reading journal entries where she says he alluded to being sexually abused by a male figure when he was a child.

“There was so much happening that I had no clue,” Holker told People, “but it also helped me process that he was going through so much and he was hiding so much, and there must have been a lot of shame in that.” She said that reading his journals “gave me a better perspective of where he was in life and the type of things he was struggling with,” and also gave her “empathy towards him and sadness for all the pain that he was holding.”

Boss’s friends and family are accusing Holker of lying and profiting off her husband’s death.

In the wake of the interview, several members of Boss’s inner circle have spoken out against Holker and suggested she’s been clashing with those close to him in the years since his death. Boss’s friend and collaborator, dancer Courtney Ann Platt, posted a screenshot of People’s headline to her Instagram feed along with a long caption calling the interview “the most tacky, classless, opportunistic act I have ever seen in my entire life.” She claimed Holker had Boss’s funeral attendees sign NDAs so as not to “ruin his name,” only to turn around and “write a book with all the dirty laundry smearing his name and attempting to dim the bright, loyal, loving light that was your husband, my friend.” She also accused Holker of “shamelessly sharing the pages of your husband’s journal,” mounting a “smear campaign for a buck,” and treating Boss’s mother “like garbage,” before calling Holker “a living, breathing bulldozer.”

According to E!, Boss’s brother, Drè Rose, put Platt’s post on his Instagram Stories, writing, “No lies told,” and has been reposting other Stories, many of them seemingly from friends of Boss’s, criticizing Holker. (Some of them include similar accounts of signing NDAs at the DJ’s funeral.) Rose and other family members have also posted a statement from Boss’s mother, Connie, which said that “our family is absolutely appalled by the misleading and hurtful claims” made about her son. The statement doesn’t name Holker, but other friends and family have been much more explicit. One of Boss’s cousins, Elle, has been posting on X, where she accused Holker of “trying to tarnish his legacy” and claimed she “won’t let our family see the kids.”

Holker says her intentions are good.

Amid all this, Holker took to her own Instagram Stories to defend making her husband’s struggles public. “My only intention in writing the book is to share my own story as well as part of my life with Stephen to help other people,” she wrote. “I never really knew what happened,” she went on, saying that she wanted to “celebrate the love and life I shared with Stephen and our three beautiful children, and also the more complex aspects of both our lives.” She added that she started working with several mental-health organizations since Boss’s death, writing, “I believe that if Stephen were able to choose, he would choose to have his story told if it meant saving even one life.”

In the U.S., the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 988 (call or text) or 988lifeline.org (chat).