Miley Cyrus Opens Up About Relationship with Dad Billy Ray Cyrus

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | June 13, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | June 13, 2024 |

I feel like I hear some rumor as to the potential estrangement of one or more members of the Cyrus family at least daily. Miley and Billy Ray have allegedly been feuding since the latter divorced the former’s mother, Tish Cyrus, in 2022. Tish has since remarried, and two of her children, Noah and Braison, weren’t at the wedding. Billy Ray also remarried last year, but now he’s filed for divorce after only 7 months of marriage, and as if that isn’t bad enough, “he’s asking the court to annul their marriage, claiming it was fraudulent.”

Miley is in her privacy era as of late. She still makes music (obviously), but she doesn’t tour anymore and has been very open about her relationship with fame as she gets older. So, directly addressing rumors is not her style. She did, however, make an appearance on David Letterman’s show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, and talked about her family. When Letterman asked if her dad was her hero, she responded, “Honestly, my mom is my hero.” But she is “grateful” for her dad.

“He has a relationship and a foot on the ground to the real and to nature and he always did, even when he was super famous. I’m grateful for being able to watch him ahead of me. He’s almost given me this map. And there’s a map of what to do and what not to do, and he’s guided me on both,” she said. She added that it wouldn’t be fair to measure her parents’ respective contributions to her success “on the same scale.”

“Without my dad, I know—I mean, not just literally I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair, I wouldn’t exist—but I would not, who I am as a person, it wouldn’t exist. Because my dad, as a creative and as an artist in the way that his brain works, has always made me feel safer in my own mind because we’re very similar in our ideas. So I think a lot of his perspective on reality and on life, I’ve inherited from him, more so than the way that I was raised—which really, my mom raised me.”

Letterman tried to address the rumors, saying, “There’s not estrangement here with your father, it’s just the way things are played?”

“Yeah,” she answered. “I think, what is so beautiful is that my parents, they served their children, and I know this. My parents served us and sacrificed so much for us. Anything we dreamed of, they made possible.” …Yikes.

She implied that the differences in how her parents were raised has contributed to how they raised her and what their relationships are like now.

“My mom was adopted so my mom was chosen,” she said. “My grandmother spoiled not only her but me completely rotten. My dad didn’t have that.”

“The way my dad was raised, he grew up very poor in a very small town. His parents were divorced when he was very young. My dad had a pretty rough childhood and my childhood, really—I mean, we can go on and talk about the hard times and the struggles; you know, turning in my homework and learning my lines was tough—but I had food, I had love, I grew up in a beautiful big house. And my dad didn’t have that. So I have a lot of empathy and compassion for his childhood, which obviously developed to create the man he is not that I have a lot of love for.”

Translation: I understand why you are the way you are, but I still hate it. See also: I love you but I don’t like you.