'Dance Moms' star Abby Lee Miller wants to team up with Kim Kardashian on prison reform
It’s been over one year since Abby Lee Miller was released from prison after serving time for bankruptcy fraud. But the Dance Moms star still hasn’t recovered from her time behind bars and wants to team up with Kim Kardashian to work on prison reform.
“It’s a strange thing, and I could talk for days about our prison reform system,” she told Yahoo Entertainment while on the BUILD Series stage. “Can Kim Kardashian call me please, please? Can someone get a message to her? I have so much to tell her. It is absolutely insane.”
The Pennsylvania-native has been candid about the 10 months that she served in a California correctional institution where she says that the food was “disgusting” and the guards were mean. Now, she’s opening up about how she even suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result.
“There’s a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder. I didn’t fight in a war, like my dad did, and I didn’t go through what other people have gone through,” she explained, “but I hear somebody with keys or a door slam, and I just jump out of my skin because you just never know.”
Miller even admitted that her time on television prior to her imprisonment had a negative impact on how she was treated, saying that guards couldn’t separate her reality TV persona from her reality as an inmate. Still, the most detrimental treatment she faced had to do with her health.
“The doctor there took me off of my thyroid medication and my diabetes medication cold turkey,” she said. “I was out two months later and five days went by and I had a pain in my neck and was paralyzed from the neck down 10 days later. So something went wrong in my body.”
The star’s year-long sentence was cut short in May 2018 because of health complications that ended with a Burkitt lymphoma cancer diagnosis. Now, Miller is in a wheelchair and openly sharing her journey through physical therapy where she is re-learning how to walk. She says that her poor health kept her from being the advocate that she wanted to be, although she now gets to advocate for a different group of people.
“I could’ve been an advocate for women in prison. That was my goal,” she said. “Then I got a pain in the neck and it all just spiraled out of control. So I think that now, I can be an advocate for people in a wheelchair.”
Still, Miller believes that Felicity Huffman, who was recently sentenced to 14 days in prison as a result of her part in the college admission scandal, can make her time in prison well spent.
“Felicity’s gonna be there just enough time to get all of the material she needs for a fabulous movie,” Miller said.
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