Tragic Details About The Cast Of Dance Moms

When reality television shows are at the height of their popularity, it can be exciting to watch them launch brand-new stars into the entertainment industry stratosphere. That was the case with "Dance Moms," a series that initially ran on Lifetime from 2011 to 2019. It was a sensation, cementing dance coach Abby Lee Miller as an iconic villain for the ages even as it kickstarted the careers of entertainers like JoJo Siwa and Maddie Ziegler. Fans tuned in to watch the way Miller yelled at her young charges, and they loved even more the way the mothers would fight back for their daughters.

In the years since the show's peak, however, many viewers have started to reconsider the way it functioned. At its core, "Dance Moms" was about watching children be humiliated on national television — they were criticized, yelled at, and mocked on numerous levels. As a result, many now view "Dance Moms" in a different light ... as do its former participants. As they've grown up and gone off to have careers of their own separate from the show, many have revealed just how damaging the series was to their still-forming identities. Others have experienced tragic events that put things into perspective. Even Miller has gone through the wringer, between her run-ins with the law and her experience with cancer. These are the most tragic details about the cast of "Dance Moms."

Back in 2010, Abby Lee Miller filed for bankruptcy in order to reorganize her dance studio business. She wasn't actually out of money, however, and in 2015, the government finally took notice. She was indicted on 20 counts of bankruptcy fraud and was accused of hiding money — even paying her mother instead of herself — to the tune of $755,000. "Criminal prosecution is appropriate when debtors corrupt the bankruptcy process through deceit and lies before the court," a judge said (via Deadline).

Miller was ultimately sentenced to one year and one day in prison. At Miller's sentencing, Judge Joy Flowers Conti scolded the reality star. "You weren't truthful, even when you knew you were supposed to tell everything, you still weren't truthful. Somehow you got caught up in the world of fame and you lost your moral compass," she said (per Deadline).

In an interview with "Access Hollywood, she revealed that her time behind bars was rather miserable, (via YouTube). "The prison doctor took me off all of my medication cold turkey, completely," she said, revealing that prison employees ripped her eyelashes off. "I think they thought they were the strips, but they weren't. They were extensions. Ripping your earrings out of your ears, all kinds of things." Ultimately, the prison where she was incarcerated got a new warden, and they helped Miller out. She served the final few months of her sentence in a halfway home.

Beginning in 2014, Sia and "Dance Moms" breakout star Maddie Ziegler enjoyed a creative partnership that included numerous music videos and live performances. It all started on X, formerly Twitter. "Sia was a fan of our show," Ziegler told Vulture. "She actually tweeted us, 'Hey, Maddie, would you like to be in my new video for my new song 'Chandelier?”' Ziegler was excited about the opportunity. "I flew to LA two weeks later, and ... I filmed it," she said. They would go on to work together in videos for hits like "The Greatest" and "Elastic Heart," and Ziegler joined the Australian singer for live performances at places like "Ellen" and the Grammys.

In 2021, Sia directed Ziegler in a feature film called "Music," which saw her play a nonverbal girl with autism named Music. The movie was roundly criticized for not working with an actor who actually had the developmental condition, and Sia invited a fresh round of criticism when she defended the decision. "I realized it wasn't ableism, I mean it is ableism I guess as well, but it's actually nepotism because I can't do a project without her," she told "The Sunday Project" (via CNN). "I don't want to. I wouldn't make art if it didn't include her."

The movie bombed, and Ziegler earned the Razzie Award for worst supporting actress. Speaking to The Independent, Ziegler insisted that "it was all [made] with good intentions and with a good heart." For the record, Sia has a tragic life story all her own.

Though Maddie Ziegler and JoJo Siwa are now adults stars in their own right, when they started on "Dance Moms," they were young children. That's why it's extra tragic that they faced a disturbing amount of unwanted attention from viewers of the show, including one frightening incident that ended in a man's arrest. In 2015, Phoenix Sundown was nabbed by the cops after he confessed to having sent a number of packages to Siwa and Ziegler. He had gotten several tattoos related to "Dance Moms," including a zombie-fied version of Abby Lee Miller, and he appears to have been fixated on Ziegler and Siwa in particular.

The packages, which reportedly included dead animals and pornographic material, were scary enough. But Sundown also evidently believed that Siwa and Ziegler were sending him coded messages online that they were open to his advances. In an interview from jail, he told ABC 10 (via The Hollywood Reporter), "They know I'm not going to come swinging through a rope and smashing through a window and screaming with print outs that we married. I'm not that crazy." Thankfully, Sundown was caught before things went any further, and he was sentenced to three years in prison in 2016.

Aside from Maddie Ziegler and JoJo Siwa, the most memorable "Dance Moms" alum might just be Chloe Lukasiak. Fans love to debate whether she deserved more time atop The Pyramid, the show's weekly ranking of how each girl was doing in class. Lukasiak herself, on the other hand, has spoken out against that very ranking system. "It's not a normal thing to do," she said in a 2019 YouTube video. "Let's rank children and tell them how terrible they are, and then the one child at the top, we're gonna give them compliments. It's so healthy! ... Imagine standing there for two hours listening to your dance teacher talk, and most of the time she's telling five out of six children how horrible they are."

On the show, she was often fiercely defended by her own dance mom, Christi Lukasiak. Off-set, Christi found herself in hot water when she was arrested in June 2024 for driving under the influence. The month before, she crashed her car into a tree, admitted to having two glasses of wine before driving, and failed sobriety tests in the field. "[She] refused to submit to a blood draw to determine her blood alcohol content," police said (via USA Today). As of this writing, the legal case is still ongoing.

When "Dance Moms" premiered, Abby Lee Miller almost instantly entered the pantheon of reality television's greatest villains. Fans tuned in each week to watch the horrid way she spoke to her young students, soaking up her cutting put-downs that earned the ire of the dancers' overly-involved stage moms. It was the point of the show, but occasionally, it went way, way too far.

In November 2013, Miller allegedly got into a physical altercation with "Dance Mom" Kelly Hyland. Though Hyland denied the specifics, she admitted that she'd been provoked by her daughter's dance teacher. "She hurts my children every day," she told ABC News. "Every time she opens her mouth she hurts my children." In addition to criminal charges resulting from the fight, the whole thing spiraled into a lawsuit where Hyland accused Miller of causing her daughter to develop anxiety. She also sued for defamation, insisting that in the wake of the fight, Miller had accused her of being an alcoholic.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ruth Ann Kwan wasn't convinced that Paige Hyland's anxiety was Miller's fault. "That's assuming nothing else goes on in the life of a young child," she said, per The Hollywood Reporter. Various lawsuits relating to the situation were finally settled in 2015, and as a result, the Hyland family got new floors put in their home. Not the worst possible outcome!

Shortly after Abby Lee Miller left prison and entered a halfway home, she felt a pain in her neck. Before long, it was intense. "Three days later, it was so severe," she recalled at an audience Q&A posted to her TikTok. "I was like, sweating, I was white as a ghost ... Sweating profusely, my eyes bugging out, speaking in gibberish. My jaw was completely numb."

At first, when she visited various doctors, they couldn't figure out what was wrong. Miller claims to have visited six separate healthcare professionals over the course of 10 days before finally finding one who made an accurate diagnosis. Her pain, in fact, had spread so quickly that she woke up one morning paralyzed from the neck down. Ultimately, Miller learned that she had a tumor on her spine. "This mass/tumor choking my spinal cord turned out to be Burkitt Lymphoma," she wrote on Instagram.

Miller underwent chemotherapy, several surgeries, physical therapy, and more, and though doctors were able to halt the spread of the disease, she now uses a wheelchair. Speaking with Entertainment Tonight, she revealed that it's made her life much more difficult than fans realize.  "When they see me out and I'm in makeup, my hair's done, I'm moving, I'm grooving, they're like, 'She's great. She's fine,'" Miller reflected. "They don't really see what happens before that."

In 2020, at the height of the protests against police brutality after the murder of George Floyd, a former "Dance Moms" star accused Abby Lee Miller of racist on-set behavior. Adriana Smith and her daughter Kamryn were on the 8th season of "Dance Moms," and Smith claimed Miller had used racist language in criticizing her daughter's dancing skills.

"A statement from her that sticks in my mind to this day during my time on DMS8 is 'I know you grew up in the HOOD with only a box of 8 crayons, but I grew up in the Country Club with a box of 64 — don't be stupid," Smith wrote on Instagram. "This to me shows that you think you are better than me and in higher rank and all together superior to ME!" She also said Kamryn overheard Miller saying she was cast for "a sprinkle of color." At the time, her daughter was only 7.

Miller replied to the accusation in a social media post of her own. "To Kamryn, Adriana, and anyone else I've hurt, I am truly sorry," she reflected. "I realize that racism can come not just from hate, but also from ignorance. No matter the cause, it is harmful, and it is my fault." Lifetime had been working on a pandemic-set "Dance Moms" spinoff called "Abby's Virtual Dance Off," but amid the controversy, the show was canceled.

After "Dance Moms" ended, JoJo Siwa went on to have a career of her own as a social media mainstay. She's a pop star, an actor, a television host, and was a contestant on "Dancing With The Stars." She's also developed quite a following on TikTok, where she has 45.9 million followers at the time of this writing. 

It was on that app in 2023 that Siwa revealed the tragic loss of her adorable dog, Tooie. She'd only had the pup for two months when he was killed. "My heart hurts so much to say that this morning he was involved in an accident and is now in puppy heaven," she wrote in the video's caption. "I can't even explain how perfect of a dog O2 was. Going to miss him more than words can explain. Thank you for bringing light to my life when it was dark tooie boy." Though Siwa was unclear about what, exactly, had happened, the dog was reportedly killed by a coyote. While the species can present a danger to household pets, some consider a coyote sighting to be good luck. 

Like several of her "Dance Moms" contemporaries, Payton Ackerman struggled under the intense pressure of being in the spotlight at such a young age. While she was on the show, she attracted negative attention from a certain subsection of viewers, leading to a very dangerous event that made her reconsider her family's safety. In 2018, Ackerman revealed in a YouTube video that things got quite dark thanks to the way she was portrayed on the series. She told fans that at first, things were great. "It went crazy," she said. "People loved it. It was honestly like, an overnight success, I feel like. Like, we couldn't even fathom how popular and amazing it happened overnight, because we were like, what? This is just our friends."

Ackerman wasn't initially a focus of the show, but one night her mother got upset that "Dance Moms" was filming when it should've been time for her dance class. Her rant caught the attention of producers, who invited Ackerman to film. "There was so much drama," Ackerman said. "And they immediately made us look like the bad people, the crazy ones, the bullies," After she was coached to say she was the best at a competition, things soured, and the Ackermans became villains. "It got to the point where I was getting death threats," she said. "People were calling my home phone in the middle of the night. People were showing up to our front door ... Reality television isn't scripted, but it's not reality."

It's very difficult to become famous at a young age. After all, many child stars tragically die young. On "Dance Moms," the children at the center of the show were often harshly criticized for their dancing skills, yes, but also their young, still-developing bodies. Their weight was commented on cruelly not just on-set by staff like Abby Lee Miller, but by fans and viewers worldwide.

It's no surprise, then, that the pressure can be too much to handle. Former "Dance Moms" star Chloe Lukasiak opened up in April 2020 on X, formerly Twitter, sharing a poem that makes reference to bulimia. "Sharing this feels messy. Like tearing off a bandage before the wound has stopped bleeding," she wrote in the caption. "I need to share it with all of you, though. If you have experienced an eating disorder, I hope this makes you feel less alone."

The following year, Lukasiak went into more detail in a since-unlisted YouTube video, according to People. She acknowledged that she wasn't quite ready to talk about her experience the year before, but that therapy had helped her understand how the difficulty of fame made her view her body. "It's kind of taboo and brushed under the rug," she said. "And I just want to start the discussion because I think it's really important to kind of bring light to it." She'd come to understand herself as someone with anorexia, bulimia, and body dysmorphia, and she was getting the help she needed. "I'm in a beautiful place," she said. "I'm in a happy place. I'm in a safe place."

In 2024, "Dance Moms" returned as "Dance Moms: A New Era." The show now airs on Hulu rather than Lifetime, and it follows an all-new group of girls at an all-new dance studio, studying the art form under a new coach, Gloria Hampton. There's still plenty of drama, and on one episode that aired in the 1st season, a dance family revealed an incredibly tragic backstory.

The episode involves spiritual themes, and when a psychic tries to connect with someone who's experienced a death from a car crash, nothing happens at first. Eventually, though, dancer Mina Terry confesses that her brother died in an automobile accident the year before. It's an emotional moment, made all the more emotional by her mother Min's confession.

"My parents don't know my son passed away," Min told the cameras (via Decider). "They're in China. They always, when I call them, they always ask, how is my son. I said, 'Okay. He's okay.' I don't want them ... to know that." Ultimately, the "Medium" dance becomes a way for Min and Mina to bond. "Siyan died two years ago," Min tells her daughter in the episode. "This time is your time to dance for him. Thank you."

If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

f you need help with an eating disorder, or know someone who does, help is available. Visit the National Eating Disorders Association website or contact NEDA's Live Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. You can also receive 24/7 Crisis Support via text (send NEDA to 741-741).