Abby Lee Miller Sounds Off on Cheryl Burke Joining Dance Moms: 'They're Going to Treat Her a Hell of a Lot Better'
Abby Lee Miller believes that Cheryl Burkes turn on Dance Moms will be drastically different from her own experience on the reality series.
Just days after Miller, 50, abruptly quit the show and announced her resignation in an Instagram post on Sunday - she claimed she had been “manipulated and disrespected” by producers - the Dancing with the Stars alum began filming on Wednesday.
Speaking with PEOPLE on Wednesday, Miller, who found out about her potential replacement earlier in the day, says of 32-year-old Burke: “I don’t want to speculate. I’ve only met her once. She’s already training.”
But although Miller is uncertain which capacity Burke, 32, will serve on the Lifetime dance show, there is one thing she’s confident of.
“I just know they’re going to treat her a hell of a lot better than they treated me, for now,” says Miller. “Give her six years, they’ll talk to her like she’s dirt too.”
“I think bringing in a stranger that has a resume is going to be so much more important to them than me [and] the people that have been there for seven years, day in and day out, working our butts off. She’ll get all the perks and we’ll get all the jerks,” she continues.
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While Miller doesn’t know what position the former DWTS pro will hold, she speculates that Burke, who revealed Wednesday on Instagram that she was returning to dance-related work, will “be in charge.”
“I’m guessing that they finally found someone to be in charge. Instead of having a different choreographer every week as the girls were saying, they found someone to be in charge of that team with the teenagers. I was going to have the minis and we were going to battle against each other,” she says. “I don’t think she was replacing me. I think she was becoming the supervisor of the older kids is what I think.”
She adds: “Maybe [Lifetime was] talking to Cheryl to get her to choreograph or just be the me’ person. I don’t know.”
Miller’s decision to quit comes as the choreographer finds herself in the midst of a bankruptcy fraud case. She is facing up to two and a half years in prison after pleading guilty in October to attempting to hide $775,000 of income during proceedings following a 2010 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and to failing to report $120,000 in Australian currency that she allegedly brought into the country illegally.
Officials postponed Miller’s sentencing court date in February.
