“I hope that Nikki and Artem are protecting their heart, and I hope that, more importantly, their son is okay,” Burke tells PEOPLE
Cheryl Burke is offering Nikki Garcia some advice following Artem Chigvintsev’s arrest last month.
The former DWTS pro was arrested on a felony charge of corporal injury to spouse in Napa Valley on Aug. 29, PEOPLE confirmed at the time. And while it was never officially stated, Garcia was presumed to be the spouse involved.
Now, Burke, 40, tells PEOPLE that she was initially caught off guard when giving her reaction to the incident on her podcast, Sex, Lies and Spray Tans, because the news broke as she was recording.
“Doing [the segment] Headlines and Hot Topics about my friends is hard, I’m not even going to deny it,” she admits. “It is my job and I will do it, but I don’t necessarily feel comfortable doing it because I know that feeling when you’re being talked about, and it’s not fun.”
Over the past few weeks, Burke says she has had time to think about the situation more clearly. While sharing that her “heart goes out to” everyone involved, the podcast host says there is one person who she has on her mind most.
“This is just a really unfortunate situation, and I just hope everybody’s okay,” she says. “I hope that Nikki and Artem are protecting their heart, and I hope that, more importantly, their son is okay.”
“I just send them all so much love,” she continues. “And I hope that they take the time that they need to heal, even if that means putting your career on hold for a little bit.”
Following Garcia filing for divorce from Chigvintsev on Sept. 13, Burke is also offering some words of wisdom to to the former WWE wrestler as she also experienced a public divorce from actor Matthew Lawrence in 2022.
“It’s not easy, but I believe if you just give the time that you need to grieve, we all grieve differently, there’s no one way that someone should experience grief, but also, it’s just important to choose you and to protect you,” she explains. “Because I think especially in society today, we tend just to take care of everyone else’s needs or what we think people want from us without really sitting with ourselves and just figuring that out, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with society today.”
As for being single, Burke says “I love it now, but it took a while to get here,” adding that she and Lawrence didn’t have a child together, which makes things more complicated.
