Abby Lee Miller, star of Dance Moms, has announced that she will not be offering support to her former castmate Kelly Hyland, who is currently battling cancer.
Kelly’s daughters, Paige and Brooke, were former students at Abby’s dance studio, where their participation played a significant role in the show’s rise to fame, largely due to Abby’s notorious tough-love teaching style.
Abby and Kelly’s relationship was marked by intense conflict, culminating in a physical altercation that was filmed on camera. The incident led to Kelly’s arrest, although the charges against her were eventually dropped.
In 2014, Kelly filed a $5 million lawsuit against Abby, claiming that the dance teacher attempted to bite her during an altercation. Additionally, Paige, who was 13 at the time, also sued Abby for assault. While Kelly and Abby eventually reached a settlement, Paige’s lawsuit was dismissed.
In 2017, when Abby was sentenced to prison for bankruptcy fraud, Kelly and several other dance mothers were seen in the back of the courtroom, celebrating the outcome.
Now, Abby has stated that she has no intention of reaching out to the Hylands during Kelly’s battle with cancer. She also pointed out that Kelly never reached out to Abby when she was battling Burkitt lymphoma in 2018, according to a report from TMZ.
In 2023, Kelly was diagnosed with breast cancer. This week, she shared an emotional video of herself ringing the hospital bell after completing her second round of treatments.
With a balloon that read, “Peace out, cancer,” Kelly hugged her children—Paige, Brooke, and Josh—along with the hospital staff who supported her throughout her journey.
However Abby has remarked that she was unable to relate to Kelly’s video, after she herself was on her deathbed from Burkitt lymphoma.
Abby accused the Hylands of never contacting her while she was suffering through her own bout of cancer, which she defeated in 2019.
She clarified though that she still harbors well wishes for Kelly in her struggle with the illness, adding that Kelly has no need of any support from her, as she gets plenty from her children, ex-husband and father.
Abby’s cancer diagnosis came on the heels of her early release from prison, where she lost over 100lbs while serving eight months of a year-and-a-day sentence for bankruptcy fraud and smuggling $120,000 Australian into the United States.
The reality star was at a halfway house after her departure from jail when her health steeply declined and she headed to the hospital.
She underwent emergency spinal surgery and also endured chemotherapy, but she retained her resolve to go back to work at her Abby Lee Dance Company, where she wore a wig after going bald from her cancer treatments.
‘I need to get back to teaching, and I need to get back to screaming at children,’ she said at the time. ‘I need to get back to my roots.’
Apart from the lawsuits, Abby and Kelly are not known to have interacted since the brawl that prompted the Hylands’ departure from Dance Moms in 2014.
However a group of ex-Dance Moms including Kelly was seated in the back of the courtroom gleefully watching as Abby received her prison sentence in 2017.
Abby confessed she felt hurt by the women’s appearance in court, saying: ‘They were all laughing at me,’ in an interview with In Touch.
After the sentence was handed down, Kelly and the other mothers toasted the result with champagne, in a photo she posted with the caption: ‘Who is happiest ???’
