Dance Moms, Internet Sleuths, and A Small Nation Run By Children.
I talked with investigative reporter and soccer ball juggler Molly Hensley-Clancy about the horrors of kids on reality television, and the internet sleuths obsessed with finding the truth.
Hello again! After a brief interlude to help a friend move to another city and then immediately move back again, I’m ready to share my first collaborative Rabbithole journey. This one is an interview with the cult-obsessed, women’s soccer fanatic, Molly Hensley-Clancy who also happens to be a brilliant political/investigative reporter and former BuzzFeed News colleague of mine.
Molly has spent the pandemic learning how to juggle a soccer ball without dropping it 724 times in a row. She also, during a brief hiatus from juggling and pursuing her dream job, became completely obsessed with the reality TV show Dance Moms and the network of internet sleuths trying to uncover the truth behind the show and its many controversies.
Dance Moms, which aired on Lifetime from 2011 through to 2019, is about a dance studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that trains girls ages 6-15 to dance in nationwide competitions. The show, as the title implies, was intended to focus on the stage moms of the dancers, as well as the dance instructor Abby Lee Miller, but the kids ended up bearing a lot of the weight of the drama. It follows many of the same girls and moms throughout the series, allowing viewers to get to know them intimately.
While watching, Molly dove deep into the massive, obsessive world of internet sleuths who have analyzed every scene, rumor, legal document, and social media clue in attempts to uncover what really happened on this show behind the manipulative editing and production.
(Molly and I spoke by phone and I edited this for length, clarity, and context, with some explanatory parentheticals)
Molly, tell me, how did you first fall down this rabbit hole?
Well, it all started with Sia.
Sia just made this terrible movie (called Music) that many people have probably heard about, and it stars the star of Dance Moms, Maddie Ziegler. I watched the trailer and it's like... if you haven't watched it, it's jaw-droppingly bad in terms of how awful she is at portraying someone with autism. Many disability advocacy groups have said how offensive it is (“an offensive piece of ableist minstrelsy,” as one reviewer put it). But the first conspiracy I encountered was about Maddie’s (allegedly) incredibly weird and twisted relationship with Sia. She’s talked publicly about how Maddie (who was 8 when she was first on Dance Moms, met Sia around 12, and is now 19) sleeps over once a week, and she calls herself Maddie’s “bonus mom,” she even had t-shirts made that say “bonus mom” on them. She has publicly said things like, ‘if you didn’t already have a great mom I would totally adopt you,’ and, ‘I can only do art because of you, Maddie.’ Those are very strange, pressure-filled things to say to a kid. So that started me wanting to watch Dance Moms, and then I was hooked.
Man that’s intense. I feel like the world of celebrities adopting older children needs to be re-examined. In the ‘90s and early ‘00s a lot of people who did it, like Madonna and Angelina Jolie, were made fun of and casually accused of “white saviorism,” but there hasn’t been a serious re-examination of that. It seems almost pathological in some cases, less about the children than the adoptive parents. But that’s a whole other story. Tell me about Dance Moms.
There are eight seasons, but they’re long seasons. One of them has like, 40 episodes. I watched four seasons and I’ve finally stopped after my favorite character left and my brain started to turn to oatmeal.
The show ended when Abby Lee Miller (the head of the dance school, main instructor, and “matriarch of the studio,” as Molly put it) was accused of being a racist, which, if you watch the show, is no shock. She’s openly racist in some episodes. And the show makes it look like she’s very abusive toward the kids. Back in 2011 I don’t know if we would have described it that way, but she berates them and screams at them and they all seem terrified of her, and these are like, 8, 9, 10 year-old girls.
Eek, sounds rough. But what are the conspiracy theories around it?
Many of the conspiracy theories have to do with how the producers manipulate the truth of the show, which obviously happens a lot with reality TV, but it felt extremely blatant in this show for me. Also at the center of the show are children, so a lot of the time they’re manipulating [the show] to make like a kid look bad or to put a kid in a weird, traumatic, or terrifying situation. Not many reality TV shows star children, for obvious reasons, so that’s why it was particularly interesting to me to find out about all the insane lying people say the producers did.
Most of my credit goes to this one YouTube user, MackZBoss, who should really consider an investigative journalism career. She has this investigative series where she dives into different Dance Moms controversies, and she's very good. She will like, go look at behind the scenes footage, interviews, records from the dance competitions. So she'll find things out like, for example, the producers tried to make it look like these girls boycotted their friend's music video premiere because they were jealous of her, when, in fact, there's evidence that they were at a dance competition that day. She can show you exactly when they danced, so there was no way that they could have gone. And people will watch these and go further in the comments and on Reddit and in other videos.
Wow I love that. There’s few things I love more in this world than people putting a lot of professional-level investigation into subjects that seem frivolous.
Yes, absolutely. But Twitter circa 2011, 2012 was the original place where these theories started, because the moms would live tweet the episodes as they aired and be like, ‘Well that is not what happened at all.’ At some point the producers seemed to have clamped down on it, because it just stopped. There’s also videos of meet-and-greets where people were not supposed to be filming and the moms ended up airing all the dirty laundry of what did and didn’t happen. People also have videos of fights being staged, producers whispering in a mom’s ear, things like that. So there’s conspiracy theories, but there’s also a lot of really solid evidence.
What are some of the craziest controversies?
There’s this iconic moment where Maddie Ziegler forgets her solo in the middle of a competition. Maddie is Abby Lee Miller’s favorite, Abby is very awful to the other kids but she’s never awful to Maddie. Every time another kid forgets their solo — which happens all the time — they get screamed at, they’re terrified, she calls them mean names. But with Maddie, Abby just gets really upset and starts to cry. So all the moms react like, ‘this is so unfair, this is a perfect example of the double standard,’ and it becomes a whole, long, iconic moment of television.
But the moms were live tweeting the show as it aired, and they said that in this scene Abby had actually just found out that her mother had cancer. So the show depicts her leaving in a rage because Maddie lost, when in fact she’s leaving because she’s going to the hospital to be with her mom who had cancer. And her mom ends up dying in the next season.
Jesus.
Then there’s the metanarrative going on throughout the whole show: that the moms are super outraged at Abby and the dance studio, always saying things like, ‘I can’t believe she’s doing this to my kid,’ mad that she’s dressing them in oversexualized costumes doing oversexualized dances, making them dance to songs that highlight some flaw of theirs. But according to these theories, it basically seems like every single one of those decisions is being made by the producers. This, again, is not that shocking in reality TV, except that these are children. The producers are making decisions like switching the music at the last minute to make it really hard for this kid so she messes up her solo, prompting a screaming fight between the mom and the dance teacher.
But you can see that the kids are often quite messed up by this, and they have panic attacks, or they sob in terror of what the teacher is going to say to them.
One of the most egregious examples of this is, there was an episode where the moms supposedly go on strike against the dance teacher. It shows them sitting in their cars, not going into the dance studio.
But actually (according to the internet sleuths) the moms were actually on strike against the production company, not the dance studio. Supposedly, the production company in the first season had paid them only $600 for the entire season of this show.
Woah. So it was a workers’ rights thing kinda.
Yeah, it’s wild. And it was a really popular show, it was generating a ton of money. So they were sitting there wanting their contracts to be renegotiated, and the producers edited it to make it seem like it was part of the drama and they were mad at the teacher.
There’s these little rebellions like that throughout the show actually.
Another example: As the show goes on the producers end up having to stage a lot of the competitions the girls compete in. These real competitions last all weekend long, but the show couldn’t legally film the girls for that long because of child labor laws.
So there’s an episode that has a special interview that the teacher Abby Lee Miller did where, in the middle, she quickly flashes this sign at the camera that says “I was fined $50k for refusing to attend a fake competition.”
Apparently another time she was fined because the producers wanted her to do a teen pregnancy themed dance with these 12-year-old girls where one of them would have a baby bump on the stage and she refused. I don’t mean to try to redeem her at all, she is not a good person, she seems racist and abusive on the show, but she did refuse to do this dance.
So it seems like a lot of these people got trapped into this show and couldn’t escape?
Well, the thing I’m most interested in that was not really resolved — though MackZBoss makes a valiant effort — is why do the moms stay on this show? There are points where their daughters are hyperventilating to the point of not being able to breathe because they’re so anxious, why would they keep putting them through that?
The rumor is that there’s this basically unbreakable contract that they have to stay in it for six years and if they leave their kids can't dance at another studio, they get fined, etc.
One mom, whose 11-year-old daughter was constantly being berated, called a snake by her teacher etc, repeatedly said on Twitter that she cannot leave the show because they have a contract that goes on for years that they can’t get out of. Others have said that too.
One of the few times a mom gets off the show early is when she physically assaults the dance teacher in front of all the kids, it's horrible. (The mom actually ended up suing the studio for emotional distress. The suit was dismissed, but the daughter filed another one.)
There is this one mom who is a PhD and a principal at a school, who is perplexing to me. She’s Black and her daughter is Black and she is often forced to do these fairly racist dances. The mom gets mad about it, but she keeps her daughter on the show for the whole eight seasons. For me I just can’t fathom how someone who understands child development so well can think, ‘My kid is going to come out of this unscathed.’ But the kid got into UCLA so I guess she’s doing ok?
But the other thing is, a lot of their kids really did get quite famous. So it’s hard to believe the moms sometimes when they say, ‘I would leave this show if it wasn’t for the contract.’ I think dance is incredibly expensive, and they want to pay for that, and I think in some cases their kids do want to be celebrities.
They’re all social media stars now, and advertise sponsored products and stuff, so they’re likely making a decent amount of money. And some are able to get to the level of celebrity where they’re paying for their own college, some are making more than their parents.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about famous children lately, and the pipelines like this show that form them into adult celebrities. It seems like such a warping experience, part of me thinks kids shouldn’t be allowed to be famous. There should be an age limit. And yet, the world loves a famous child, and loves wunderkinds like Billie Eilish or Maddie Ziegler.
Yeah, it's actually incredibly compelling television to have children involved in reality TV. Unlike adults, you inherently trust kids, you know their tears are real, you know they’re not lying.
But of course that’s also exactly why they shouldn’t be on TV. I’m sure their moms were telling them throughout, “It’s just for TV, it’s just for TV,” but still, you know that panic attack is real, even if everything else around them is fake. Some of the kids have since talked about having to go to therapy because of the show, how they were homeschooled and their lives were interrupted. It’s really messed up.
They did actually make a really terrible reality TV show called Kid Nation that aired while we were in high school I think (2007 to be precise). But that was canceled after one season because it was like, you put a bunch of semi-supervised kids in this Old West town and it basically turns into Lord Of The Flies.
Oh my god. Well now I want to do a whole newsletter on that.
(Here is the LA Times’ description of the show in a 2007 article headlined ‘Is child exploitation legal in ‘Kid Nation’?’: “CBS sent 40 children, ages 8 to 15, to a former ghost town in New Mexico to build a society from scratch. With no access to their parents, not even by telephone, the children set up their own government, laws and society in front of reality television cameras.” Holy shit.)
It turned out they were more supervised than the show made them look. But it was still like, you know, at some point a kid (reportedly) drank bleach by accident. And he got medical attention right after. (It actually seems to have been multiple kids, according to parents and CBS, the New York Times reported. The article also says an 11 year-old burned her face with hot grease.)
But there is a kid who was the villain, which is twisted in itself. At no point should a nine-year-old girl be told she’s a villain. And TV always needs a villain.
Despite it making your brain mush, have you taken anything worthwhile away from falling down this hole?
Yeah, I think if it’s apparent how messed up the things we’re doing to children on reality TV is obvious, we should really think about what we’re doing to adults on reality TV. I mean, it’s definitely worse to do it to a kid, adults should know what they’re getting into. But they’re still being manipulated and exploited, and that has to be damaging.
Totally. It seems like a common practice on a lot of reality TV shows is to subject the stars to a kind of torture — kept up all night long, gaslit constantly, underfed, over-boozed. Anyone would stop behaving like themselves in that situation, but in that case its on national television, for their parents to watch, preserved forever.
Oh yeah definitely, and I’ve been thinking about just the evilness of a producer whose job it is to think like, how do I make this person look bad.
Ugh, yeah.
Well, I’m glad you found this interesting, no one has found this interesting. I post Instagrams about Dance Moms and literally no one responds. I’m just like, you people don’t understand!
I understand.
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