Billy Ray Cyrus: “Hannah Montana destroyed my family”

Billy Ray Cyrus is breaking his silence on Miley Cyrus, their relationship and how he’s “scared for her”. In a long interview with GQ Magazine, Billy Ray opens up about how Hannah Montana ruined his family, and how he feels used by Miley’s “handlers”. It’s a very interesting and very sad article. I’ve got some snippets here, but the entire article is worth reading here.

“For the record,” he abruptly announces, “to set it straight, I want to tell you: I’ve never made a dime off of Miley. You got a lot of people have made percentages off of her. I’m proud to say to this day I’ve never made one commissioned dollar, or dime, off of my daughter.” He knows that people often assume he is Miley’s manager, perhaps because of the dual father-manager role he plays on Hannah Montana, but that is something he has never been. And now that he has raised the subject, it seems there are a few other things he’d like to mention. “See,” he begins, “I’ve not been able to have a voice.” He explains how, with each major or minor PR uproar in recent years, he has been expected to sail in and smooth everything over. He clearly has regrets.

“Every time something happened in Miley’s career, every time the train went off the track, if you will—Vanity Fair,2 pole-dancing,3 whatever scandal it was—her people, or as they say in today’s news, her handlers, every time they’d put me… ‘Somebody’s shooting at Miley! Put the old man up there!’ Well, I took it, because I’m her daddy, and that’s what daddies do. ‘Okay, nail me to the cross, I’ll take it….’ ”

When he heard about her upcoming eighteenth-birthday party, he decided he wasn’t going to play that role anymore.

“You know why I didn’t go? Because they were having it in a bar. It was wrong. It was for 21 years old and up. Once again all them people, they all wanted me to fly out so that then when all the bad press came they could say, ‘Daddy endorsed this stuff….’ I started realizing I’m being used. If I would have went out there I would have been right in the middle of all this stuff that’s going on right now with the bong. They’d be hanging it on my ass. I had the common sense… I said, ‘This whole thing’s falling apart up there and they just want to blame all of this stuff on you again.’ I’m staying out of it.”

Because you felt you were just expected always to say everything’s okay?

“That’s right. And it’s not okay.”

Continue Reading…there’s much more!

Not long after the party, Cyrus heard that Miley’s people were looking for something. That maybe his daughter’s phone had been stolen. “And that was on the heels, the week previous, of some pictures from Spain4—a five- or seven-day period of just boom! There’s a train wreck happening and my daughter’s right in the middle of it.” Now he was hearing “stories of the handlers trying to make kids’ computers disappear and their phones disappear.” That’s all he knew. “I didn’t know what the footage was.”

So he spoke with one of the handlers.

“They told me,” he says, his contempt and despair still naked and fresh, “it was none of my business.”

“I’m dealing with somebody that had only known my daughter for possibly four years,” he says, “and I’m her daddy. I was pretty damn insulted. And I took that as the ultimate alarm. ‘It’s none of your business’! None of my business that you’re out running around L.A. trying to buy kids’ computers and phones because there’s something about my daughter…?”

“Were it not for David Lynch,” Cyrus asserts, “Miley would never have been Hannah Montana.” (Billy Ray appeared in David Lynch’s 2001 movie Mulholland Drive, where the family got their taste for movies/tv.)

In January 2010, shooting for Hannah Montana’s final episodes began. “Season four, it was a disaster,” he says. “I was going to work every single day knowing that my family had fallen apart, but yet I had to sit in front of that camera. I look back and I go, How did I ever make it through that? I must be a better actor than I thought.”

“I’ll tell you right now — the damn show destroyed my family.”

“I’m scared for her. She’s got a lot of people around her that’s putting her in a great deal of danger. I know she’s 18, but I still feel like as her daddy I’d like to try to help. Take care of her just a little bit, to at least get her out of danger. I want to get her sheltered from the storm. Stop the insanity just for a minute. When you go through what she’s been through, it takes a beating on you. And there comes a point where you just got to step back. That’s how I ended up out here.”