Abby Lee Miller Responds After Maggie Ziegler Calls 'Dance Moms' Environment 'Toxic': 'I Know What I Did for Maddie'

Abby Lee Miller is hitting back at Maddie Ziegler‘s recent comments.

In a YouTube video posted on Wednesday (June 15), the 56-year-old Dance Moms alum responded to Maddie‘s claims that the TV show’s environment was “toxic.”

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“What I don’t understand [about] the pressure, the ‘toxic’ situation — if it was so toxic, why did you keep doing it?” Abby said in the clip. “I had to [and] I tried to quit many a time and I was forced to come back to set because I signed a contract.”

“Newsflash: the kids in the original cast never had a contract. The moms had a contract, but the kids, well … they were just kind of there on a handshake. I thought [Maddie] wanted to be there. If she said, ‘I don’t want to go, I’m not going,’ kicking and screaming, stomping her feet, I’m sure her mother wouldn’t have brought her — or she would have come and talked to me about it. She never did that,” she continued.

In her initial interview, Maddie explained that Abby was “distraught” when she left the reality show.

For the longest time, we felt so guilty,” she said at the time. “She trained me, she helped me, but also, I knew I would be OK 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. I feel at peace.”

The Fallout star added, “We don’t keep in contact. But I wish her the best.”

However, Abby claimed that Maddie felt “at home” at the ALDC studio, “where everybody knew her name.”

“I was fighting for everything, for these kids to be the best that they could be on television,” she said, noting that Maddie was a “kid that I loved” and alleging that she was responsible for her frequent collaborations with Sia. “I know that what I did for Maddie, with Maddie, helped her succeed.”

Abby recently called out her Dance Moms co-stars for a separate reason.