“Dance Moms” is back is back for an eighth season and although there may be lots of drama between the dancers, it’s nothing compared to what happened to the show’s star, Abby Lee Miller.
Miller had to depart season 7 of the reality series to battle cancer and serve time in prison for bankruptcy fraud.
Today, she’s cancer free – and free from jail – and while chatting with ET Canada, she opened up about what it was really like to spend time behind bars.
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“By some I was treated like a celebrity. By others, hated. Just because they hated everything. But by most I was treated like a woman who screwed up, who made a mistake, who was indicted by the federal government who didn’t choose to fight it and there were a lot of women like that with me,” the 52-year-old detailed.
After serving eight months in prison, Miller admitted that as time passed she slowly started to feel like her old self again.
“So I was great the first two months. Then the second two months were still good. The third two months it was kind of iffy, and then the last two months when I should have been out already, it was the real Abby Lee,” she said.
“When a girl would walk down the hall like scuffling her feet I was like ‘Pick your feet up when you walk! Shoulders down, sit up straight’,” Miller recalled. “In the line in the cafeteria playing with their hair I’m like ‘You’re in the cafeteria, stop playing with your hair!’ I kind of turned into the real me as time went on.”
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However as time went on, Miller had to deal with a major health scare. Back in April 2018, the dance teacher went under spinal surgery which led to doctors discovering she had cancer.
“The type of lymphoma, Burkitt lymphoma, it grows very quickly. They said I only had it about five weeks. It grows from three weeks to eight weeks and then you’re dead. And they can also kill it very quickly,” Miller explained. “Cancer is gone. It was gone after three treatments of chemotherapy.”
She’s spending her days in a wheelchair, but the reality star isn’t holding back for season 8 of “Dance Moms”.
“I get the vibe that the public you know they love to hate me. I yell at children, I’m mean, I’m this, I’m that,” Miller said. “I would never own a dance studio, I wouldn’t be in a business that revolves around children if I didn’t love children and I didn’t love what I was doing. I make stars.”
