Toddlers & Tiaras, the TLC reality show that followed young beauty pageant contestants and their moms, took its farewell walk eight years ago, but the families who were cast in it continue to experience repercussions.
On Tuesday’s episode of Dark Side of Reality TV, former cast members spoke about receiving death threats, “creepy correspondences,” and more.
TLC
Kelly Lyerly, a pageant mom featured on the show in 2012 and 2013, with her daughters the “Tiara Twins” Alycesaundra and Giavanna Lyerly, said she got “death threats for a long time.”
People would say things to her like, “Your children are gonna hate you. You’re a terrible mother. You’ve exploited your children.”
Vice
Reruns of the series — which originally aired 2009 to 2013 and was revived for one season in 2016 — result in renewed attention.
“I recently had death threats again,” Lyerly said, “and this time the person was calling my phone and telling me that they were gonna kill me.”
Another pageant mom from the show, Darci McHenry, noted that social media had been a real issue, even back then, when she appeared on the series with her daughter, Devin. Viewers might remember that she was body-painted as a cheetah for one pageant — a look that went viral.
Vice
“So we started getting private messages on Devin’s fan pages,” McHenry said. “We started getting things like videos sent to us, and that opened us up to getting some pretty creepy correspondences. The comments were getting crazier and crazier. Things like comments from grown men and ‘Oh my god, look at that sexy thing!'”
McHenry said that she blocks them.
“No, I’m not gonna look at your video of you enjoying yourself to the picture of my daughter,” she said. “I don’t need to see that.”
She remembers sometimes thinking that a car was driving by their home too slowly.
“I really started to step back and be like, ‘Oh, no. Like, ‘Gee, maybe I did misstep here. Maybe this is going to haunt us a little bit.'”
Former contestant EverRose Sims says that the show zooming in on her weight when she was just a little girl really affected her. Cameras captured her eating, and her mother restricting her calories.
Vice
“During the filming, I mean, I just noticed that they were following her and just videoing everything she would put in her mouth,” Kayla Sims says of her daughter, who was then 7.
Sure enough, the young girl on a diet became a storyline. EverRose has faced the consequences.
“I knew I had a bad relationship with food, because it got really bad,” the younger Sims said. “Just trying to hide it, so no one knew what I was eating. As an adult, I can’t eat in front of people because I’m self-conscious about it, cause the whole world watched me eat. Even to this day, I struggle with my relationship with food.”
Pageant mom Wendy Dickey shared a sentiment that many people who were featured on the series expressed.
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“I feel like TLC used us, and they used our family to promote the show,” Dickey said. “Toddlers & Tiaras pushed the agenda, and they were really behind some of the negative media.”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to the network for comment.
Dark Side of Reality TV airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Vice.
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