Abby Lee Miller is definitely at the bottom of the pyramid this week. The notoriously harsh dance teacher, who rose to fame on Lifetime’s reality series Dance Moms, has been sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison for committing bankruptcy fraud.
Miller has 45 days to turn herself into a correctional facility, which will most likely be in Los Angeles. She was also ordered to pay a fine of $40,000 and a $120,000 judgment for the currency-reporting violation.
When the dance coach filed for bankruptcy in 2010, the judge in her case got suspicious after watching Miller on Dance Moms. It immediately became apparent that her paychecks from the show weren’t included in the filing. This prompted an investigation that ultimately showed Miller had concealed over $755,000 in earnings.
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In an interview with People last month, Miller claimed that her predicament was largely the result of trusting the wrong people: “I went from being a dance teacher from Pittsburgh who never ran a family business, who never did the books, who never wrote the checks out [because] my dad was there, he had my back,” she claimed. “When he died, I had these temporary people in there, now we’re finding out that money was going right and left — and I didn’t know that.”
When Miller took the stand in her own defense this week, she tearfully stated: “Dance Moms became a hit and I became a laughing stock of reality TV.” She later cried as the sentence was handed down.
Never one to stay quiet for long, Miller appeared on Good Morning America today and said she plans to spend her jail time…. pretending she’s in a movie.
“A year and a day; it sounds like a movie title,” she said. “I’m just going to pretend that I am shooting a movie and we’re on set, and I am there for 10 months, and that’s the way it’s gonna be.”
That’s one way of handling it.