Following the tense exchange, Chmerkovskiy, 40, changed his TikTok status on Oct. 14 to read, “You almost saw Fresh Prince enter the ballroom last night,” according to screenshots circulating on social media.

Soon after, he issued a public apology to Inaba before addressing his suspension head-on.

“As you may have seen in the news, I won’t be in the ballroom this week,” he wrote on his Instagram Stories Oct. 17. “In a moment where my instinct was to defend my wife, I made a poor decision to reference a meme to ‘keep my wife’s name’ out of the conversation, without stopping to think through what else that reference could imply, which was genuinely never my intention.”