Giada De Laurentiis is finally on Dancing With the Stars Season 35, and she is doing it with Alan Bersten. After years of turning down the opportunity, the Food Network host said yes this time and entered the competition as one of the season’s most watched names.
That is why the search interest is landing now. Season 35 has only just begun, so her first steps on the show are the new development, not a memory of an old casting rumor. For viewers who know De Laurentiis from TV, the question is simple: what changes when she moves from the kitchen to a ballroom routine?
The answer starts with the pairing. Bersten is the partner guiding her through the competition, which gives the season an immediate benchmark for how far she can go. De Laurentiis did not stumble into the show after a short discussion; she had said no for years before finally accepting the spot on Dancing With the Stars Season 35. That makes this debut feel less like a novelty booking and more like a decision she had to be ready to make.
But the attention around her turn on the series is not only about the dance floor. A source close to the situation told the Daily Mail that Shane Farley is trying to control her time on the show. Farley, her longtime boyfriend, has been with De Laurentiis for more than a decade, and the same source described him as her boyfriend, manager, agent, bodyguard and publicist all rolled into one. The source also said he behaves like De Laurentiis is Taylor Swift with a frying pan, that everything is treated like an enormous event requiring layers of protection and control, and that everything has to go through Shane.
That picture matters because Farley is not a newcomer to her orbit. De Laurentiis and Farley first met in 2013, when he was hired to help produce a show for her and Bobby Flay. Farley later told People in 2018 that his first impression was that she was really smart and funny, and that he thought she would be a great host for a show. They were both married to different people at the time, De Laurentiis later divorced Todd Thompson in 2015, and the two reconnected and started dating a couple of years later.
The friction in the report is hard to ignore because it sits beside Farley’s own television background. He won four Emmys over the years, then appeared to slow down his career in TV production after he started dating De Laurentiis. After 2018, he worked on two one-off projects in 2020 and then took a four-year break before his next project. The same source said he acts as if he is an executive producer on the competition series and thinks he knows television better than everyone else in the room.
For now, the clean fact is that De Laurentiis is in the cast, Bersten is her partner and Season 35 is underway. The unresolved question is whether the reported effort to control her time will shape how she experiences the show, or whether the competition will stay what it is supposed to be: her moment, on her terms.
