ABBY’S PRISON HELL
HER NEW HOME Former inmates give advice — and warnings! — as Dance Moms star Abby Lee Miller prepares for lockup
They wanted to see karma in action. When Abby Lee Miller, the bossy, bullying, controversial star of Lifetime’s Dance Moms, was sentenced to 366 days in federal prison on May 9 for illegally trying to hide $775,000 in income while going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a group of her former dance students’ mothers — Kelly Hyland, Christi Lukasiak, Dawn Check and Diane Pent — made sure to snag seats in the back of the Pittsburgh courtroom. “They were laughing at me,” Abby tells In Touch. “Who is the happiest???” Kelly later posted on Instagram, next to a picture of the four women toasting with champagne!
It’s only going to get worse. When Abby, 50, reports to prison on June 23 to start serving time on fraud charges, she’ll face not only her greatest fears, which include being attacked and sexually assaulted, but horrors she never knew existed. Bizarrely, Abby tells In Touch she plans to cope by “pretending I’m shooting a movie and it’s a set, like [I’m] Matthew Mcconaughey and I’ll get into character.” But she’d better learn to face reality, fast. “It’s hard core there. And other inmates are going to see her as a walking ATM,” warns Kresta Duncan, who served time in 2010 for wire fraud in the women’s Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif., where Abby is likely to be sentenced. “Abby can’t go in trying to push people around or talk to prisoners like she does to those girls on her show. If
she doesn’t find her way quick, Abby is going to be in a world of s---.”
Her nightmare will begin with a strip search. “It’s terribly humiliating,” a former Dublin inmate, who asked only to be identified as Kathleen, tells In Touch. Then, after Abby changes into her prison uniform, she’ll meet her roommates. Behind bars, she’ll be sharing an 8-by-10-foot cell with at least two other women. “It’s crowded in there,” says Joanne Calcagno, whose daughter, Danyelle, is serving six years in Dublin for tax fraud, explaining that the prison “was originally built for 250 women and now there are closer to 1,000.” Former inmate Kathleen says the convicts can get so noisy, “She’ll need earplugs. We would buy tampons at the canteen and put the cotton in our ears so we could sleep.” That’s good advice, because she’ll need to have her bed made in time for inspection at 6:30 a.m., which is also the beginning of the prisoners’ workday. While Abby tells In Touch she’d enjoy teaching dance classes, she could end up “cleaning toilets,” says former Dublin inmate Cheryl Ward, who spent 17 years incarcerated, adding that the reality star will also have to use the bathroom in front of others: “There’s no privacy at all.”
There are no guarantees she’ll
be safe either. According to the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, 71 percent of women in the state’s prisons report experiencing continued physical abuse by guards or other prisoners. “Some people are always afraid there. You can’t go in with an attitude or you’ll get checked,” warns Cheryl. (Abby admits to In Touch that she’s “terrified” of being beat up or raped.) “There are fistfights, and it can get nasty. They’re usually about using the microwave and especially the TV.” She should “avoid fights at all costs, because she’ll get solitary confinement. And that’s terrible,” Kathleen says of the special housing unit in which those inmates who break the rules are put on lockdown for 23 hours a day. “It’s like going to jail in prison,” says Cheryl. “She needs to stay out of trouble.”
But Abby is still in denial about everything. “I just keep thinking I’m going to wake up and it’ll all have been a nightmare, that someone is going to see the light and say, ‘They went after the wrong person,’” says Abby, who was seen drowning her sorrows — with three drinks in less than an hour, according to a witness — at the LA premiere of E!’s What Happens at The Abbey on May 14. “I’m not as strong as I may appear on TV.” ◼