Abby Lee Miller is back on “Dance Moms” — following an eight-month prison stay and a battle with cancer that’s left her in a wheelchair.
“I have good days and bad days,” says Miller, 53, the famously vociferous, confrontational dance teacher who quit “Dance Moms” in 2017 after six years starring on the reality show set at her dance studio in Pittsburgh.
In October 2015 Miller was indicted on financial fraud charges, eventually pleading guilty and spending eight months in Victorville Federal Correctional Institute in California (what she refers to as her “staycation”). In April 2018, a month after her release, she was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer, following spinal surgery.
“I’m not able to walk but I’m able to stand and can take steps,” Miller says. “I’ve graduated to the walker again; I can walk about 10 steps and need a spotter behind me to block my knees from going down. It’s all due to the infection, the mass that choked my spinal cord.
“I’m in the wheelchair [on the show] and sometimes I’m sitting on stuff,” she says about Season 8 of “Dance Moms,” premiering Tuesday at 8 p.m. on Lifetime with a three-hour episode, a portion of which recounts her cancer battle. “My wheelchair is like the Cadillac of wheelchairs; it goes up and down and back and I can lay down in it,” says Miller, who will also undergo knee-replacement surgery this summer.
Despite her legal and physical woes, she says viewers won’t notice much of a difference in her on-camera demeanor in Season 8, which focuses on eight dancers (seven females, one male) — ranging in age from 7 to 13 — and their mothers.
“You’re going to see the same Abby Lee, that’s for sure,” she says. “It may seem that I’m a little mellow and maybe I don’t care as much. But that’s not the case; it’s just that these kids are better [than the former ‘Dance Moms’ dancers]. They’re hand-picked from around the country and they want this — they want to be there and want my tutelage and want me to say their name and correct them, and their parents want that, too.
“I didn’t take the [dancers] in the original show under my wing — they were kids whose mothers were nuts and those mothers were tapped for the show and the children came along,” she says. “It was supposed to be a ‘Real Housewives’ show centered around a dance studio but I feel we morphed it into a kid’s show.”
Despite everything she’s been through the past two years, Miller isn’t exactly contrite about her prison sentence.
“Everyone wants me to have this big emotional epiphany of who I should be and . . . I think it’s quite the contrary,” she says. “I’m a little more jaded. [The US government] spent close to $4 million on my case and I had to pay a $40,000 fine and $120,000 they said I brought home from another country, which I didn’t. Then they fed me three meals a day and put a roof over my head for eight months. What is that? It’s crazy.
“I have a little bit of PTSD when I hear a big bang or a loud noise or keys — I jump out of my skin,” she says. “The guards [in Victorville] were like, stupid-scary, and were just trying to intimidate me for no reason — just for their own idiotic pleasure, I guess. The whole thing was so nonsensical.
“I’m sorry for what I did and sorry it all happened. I made mistakes, trusted the wrong people,” she says. “I should’ve been on top of it and there’s no one else to blame. It was my money, my situation. Was that the right punishment for the crime, being in a wheelchair and having Burkitt lymphoma?
“I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”
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