Miley Cyrus recently opened up about a chapter of her life that somehow stayed off the radar despite her living her life in the public eye. In a no-holds-barred chat on The Ringer’s Every Single Album podcast, the pop star opened up about the chaos surrounding her 2015 Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz era, revealing how she cleverly masked her drug expenses. She also spoke about the traumatic health scare, performing for 100,000 fans while silently battling a heart condition at just 14 years old, and her time under Disney’s tight grip, which once even banned her from singing Hannah Montana songs. “I’m so glad I survived that time in my life,” she admitted.
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Miley Cyrus reveals how she hid drug money from her accountant
In 2015, the Grammy winner revealed she was secretly spending a lot of money on drugs, and to keep it hidden from her accountant, she labelled her buys as “vintage clothes.” Miley said, “And so she would get these checks. That happens on touring all the time.” Her accountant thought she had a massive designer wardrobe. “She’d ask, ‘Where’s that $15,000 John Lennon T-shirt?’ and I’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s upstairs… want some?’” Miley laughed. “We just really want to protect it. It’s really delicate. The fabric — got to take care of it. So I bought a lot of vintage clothes that year,” she added. Now 32, Miley says she’s been sober since 2019 (though she admitted to a slip during the pandemic) and that sobriety is the most important thing in her life today. “That’s like my God. I need it,” she said.
“I had to crash one more time to get to who I am now,” she said in an Apple Music interview. And that version of her, the one who wrote Flowers, is someone she’s proud of. “Writing Flowers was like unlocking something. It healed me in a way nothing else had.”
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Heart scare during Hannah Montana tour left her ‘traumatised’
Miley was 14 and in the middle of a Hannah Montana concert, her first Disney gig, when her heart started racing uncontrollably. Everyone thought it was just low blood sugar, but she was diagnosed with a condition called tachycardia. “It wasn’t just nerves,” she recalled. “People thought I had low blood sugar and handed me a cracker. But I knew something was wrong.” For the rest of the tour, she was forced to wear heart monitors on stage. She doesn’t really count it as trauma, saying she has dealt with far worse times in her life, but admitted that the incident left a mark. “People said I was nervous. I wasn’t. I was leaking blood.”
Disney Drama: The Hannah ban
Disney series Hannah Montana was Miley’s big breakthrough, she played a pop star hiding her real identity to live a normal life. But after she left the show in 2011, Disney banned her from performing any of those songs. Miley admitted, “It’s not like I even wanted to,” perform them. “Imagine me singing ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ between ‘Wrecking Ball’ and ‘We Can’t Stop.’ It just didn’t make sense.” Still, she admitted the ban stung a bit; those songs had her face and her voice. But in 2024, Disney finally recognised her as a “legend” and lifted the ban. Miley made peace with the past, joking, “If I was made in a Disney lab, something definitely glitched between 2013 and 2016. Sorry, Mickey.”
