Abby Lee Miller revealed why she thinks she didn’t receive an invite to Dance Moms: The Reunion, and she’s laying the blame on her former students.
“I think the kids can’t face me because they know they would never be where they are today if it wasn’t for the show,” Abby, 58, told Bethenny Frankel during the May 9 episode of her podcast, “Just B With Bethenny Frankel.”
Abby continued, “There’s two little girls named Brooke and Paige Hyland, who I was very close to, much closer emotionally and family-wise than any of the other kids. Their mother was in my original competition team when I was 14 years old. She stayed at my studio, then she left, got married, had kids, brought them to my studio at two years old and then stayed until the show started. My point is, if this was so toxic for all these kids, why did they come back at three and four and five and six in my studio?”
When Bethenny, 53, stated that the girls could have been forced to return to the studio because of their parents, Abby replied, “There were other studios in town. Mine was the best.”
The reality TV star also claimed that the Lifetime network wanted to portray her and her studio in a certain light.
“And what you don’t read, what you don’t read that Lifetime didn’t want anyone to know. They wanted me to be this down and out, po-dunk, heavy set dance teacher, screaming at these little kids because that made good TV,” Abby told Bethenny. “Nobody talks about the kids that I’ve had in, drum roll please, 25 Broadway shows. Did you read that anywhere? Twenty-five Broadway shows. I have had kids from Pittsburgh in, that I took, that I drove their asses back and forth to the auditions.”
Abby’s former students have previously spoken out about the dance coach’s teaching methods, including Chloe Lukasiak who exclusively told Life & Style that she felt like Abby’s intensity was “unnecessary.”
“Honestly, I don’t like to live with regrets. I think that everything happens for a reason,” Chloe, 22, told Life & Style when asked about her experience working with Abby. “And so I think the experiences I had on the show built me to be very thick skinned and to work hard and to have discipline.”
Chloe also gushed about Elevé, the dance competition she cofounded, which seemed to embrace the opposite of Abby’s methods.
“It’s all about cultivating a positive experience for dancers and reminding them of their passion for dance, but it’s really done in a positive and uplifting way – not in an intense, negative way,” Chloe explained. “I think that dance can sometimes really easily lean into the toxicity, and I think Elevé is all about just celebration of dance and love and supporting one another.”
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