Dance mom gets a year in prison
PITTSBURGH — Former “Dance Moms” reality TV star Abby Lee Miller was sentenced Tuesday to a year and a day in prison for hiding $775,000 worth of income and bringing $120,000 worth of Australian currency into the U.S. without reporting it.
U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti also fined Miller $40,000 — on top of the $120,000 in currency she’s forfeiting as part of guilty pleas entered last year — and ordered her to spend two years on probation after prison.
Miller, 51, filed for bankruptcy, just as her star was rising in 2010, after defaulting on a $245,000 Florida condominium mortgage and a $96,000 mortgage on her Abby Lee Dance Company studio in Penn Hills.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Melucci told the judge that Miller went from being a “dance mom in the bankruptcy case to dance con” by hiding her income.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Thomas Agresti nearly approved a plan to let Miller repay her creditors at lower interest rates and longer terms before he saw her on TV one night and figured she must be making far more than the $8,899 a month she initially declared. It’s a crime to deceive a bankruptcy judge about one’s income and assets because that information is used to determine the repayment plan.
Miller eventually coughed up $288,000 in TV income she didn’t initially report in 2012, then federal investigators found she’d hidden nearly $550,000 more from personal appearances, etc. Defense attorney Robert Ridge asked the judge to not hold Miller’s celebrity against her, saying Miller “was ill-equipped to deal with the brand that she became.”
