Maddie Ziegler‘s mom finally apologized for putting her through the hell that was Dance Moms!
On Monday, the 20-year-old dancer went on Emily Ratajkowski‘s podcast High Low with EmRata and shocked everyone by revealing her mom, Melissa Gisoni, actually said she was sorry! The stage mom expressed her regrets over putting Maddie and her little sister Mackenzie on the Lifetime show as children:
“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. She was like, ‘I’m so sorry that 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.”
Wow! It’s so rare for any parent to cop to their mistakes like that! In this case, the mistakes were on such a grand stage… reality TV…
Related: JoJo Siwa Explains How Childhood Fame Messed Up Her Sex Life!
Maddie talked more about how Dance Moms messed her up, claiming producers actually pushed her to be a brat when they were filming Season 1:
“When I was doing the show, in the first season … I was seven, there [were] male producers saying, ‘This is what you have to say.’ 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.’”
At just seven years old she was made out to be the “little brat” of the show. The villain edit. At age 7. She recalled getting pretty angry after seeing all the scenes cut during the premiere:
“I remember we watched the first episode at a viewing party for the launch of the show, and I just cried because I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. Everyone thinks I’m this bitch, and I’m not. I’m seven!’ It was so weird. It helped me a lot to be able to be like, ‘I can say no. I can stand up for myself.’ But being so young, you don’t realize all those things.”
Even as a kid, she understood it hurt.
While viewers often thought she was dance teacher Abby Lee Miller‘s “most well-treated dancer,” she says this was not actually the case:
“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 she was like, ‘You’re my girl, so you have to lead everyone to victory every time,’ which is just not sustainable.”
She actually called singer Sia her “guardian angel” because she “saved” her from her contract! Wow!
Explaining how bad it was, the West Side Story actress said:
“It was hard … We would do almost 30 episodes a season, so it consumed our lives.”
Even to this day she’s still suffering from anxiety and memory loss brought on by the stress of the show. She told EmRata she started dancing competitively at just four years old:
“It’s so weird. It’s weird to find out things that I did when I was younger on TikTok. I’ll see people posting things of me, and I’m like, ‘I don’t even remember doing that.’”
Wow. And sadly, Maddie isn’t the only one still suffering from her days on the show…
At least she finally got an apology. Reactions, Perezcious readers?
[Image via Lifetime/YouTube/Maddie Ziegler/Instagram]
