Maddie Ziegler‘s Dance Moms days are long behind her, but she only recently got an apology from her mother for putting her on the hit reality show when she was just a child.
Ziegler, now 20, appeared on the High Low with EmRata podcast, where she talked about her toxic upbringing on Dance Moms — in which she starred alongside her mom, Melissa Ziegler-Gisoni, from 2011 to 2016.
“Last year, I was having a really bad panic attack and I called my mom and things were coming up from the past, and she apologized to me,” Ziegler told host Emily Ratajkowski. “She was like, ‘I’m so sorry I put you through that.’ It’s so sad because she would never want to hurt us, but none of us knew how crazy it would get.”
The star went on to detail how the show’s producers manipulated many of the situations to put her in a bad light.
“When I was doing the show, in the first season [in 2011] I was seven, and there were male producers saying, ‘This is what you have to say,’ ” she explained. “My mom wasn’t in the room, so I was like, ‘OK, I just have to do whatever I’m being told.’ They would say, ‘Say you’re the best, say you’re better than everyone else, say blah blah blah.’ “
As a result, Ziegler — who cried while watching the first episode at a viewing party because everyone thought she was a “bitch” — said she was “perceived as a little brat in the first season.” Fortunately, she has since learned to “say no” and “stand up” for herself — something she didn’t know how to do when she was younger.
The West Side Story star also dished on being the favorite of Abby Lee Miller, her infamously strict dance coach, which led many to believe she was the “most well-treated dancer.”
“Looking back — and a lot of people have started to say this — it’s like, ‘Wow, she actually had the most pressure on her,’ because [Miller] was like, ‘You’re my girl, so you have to lead everyone to victory every time,’ which is just not sustainable,” Ziegler said.
It was a buildup of everything that ultimately led to her exit from the series in 2016.
“[My mom] really did everything to try to break our contract and pull us out, and eventually did with the help of Sia,” she said. “It was hard … We would do almost 30 episodes a season, so it consumed our lives.”
While Ziegler is still close with the original cast, the same can’t be said of her relationship with Miller. She previously opened up about the toxicity of Dance Moms in a 2022 interview with Cosmopolitan, in which she talked about her coach’s reaction to her departure.
“She was distraught. For the longest time, we felt so guilty,” she recalled. “She trained me, she helped me, but also, I knew I would be okay without her and I was sick of being in a toxic environment. I was like, ‘This is not for me. I can’t do this.’ I haven’t spoken to her since.”