Amber Portwood hasn’t been shy about taking aim at MTV producers she worked with on Teen Mom, and this is no exception. In the latest of Amber’s TikTok rants, she accused the network of pushing her daughter, Leah Shirley, to breach a sensitive topic with her on camera, and apparently, that‘s why Amber decided to walk away from the show forever.
Amber and Leah have been estranged for a long time.
Leah, who is now 16, lives with her dad, Gary Shirley, and his wife, Kristina, and hasn’t had much of a relationship with her mom in a long time. In more recent episodes of Teen Mom: Next Chapter, Leah has been open about wanting Kristina to adopt her — something Amber obviously hasn’t been very happy about.
On the last season of the show, Leah sent her mom a text message to let her know that it was always her decision to distance herself from Amber and that she wasn’t influenced by her dad to take a few steps back.
“I feel like recent online activities have put me in a place where I need to communicate this to put a boundary between us for myself,” Leah wrote at the time.
Amber said the text from Leah was her final straw.
When Amber went live on TikTok last week, she made it clear that she believed MTV was behind the text message and that it wasn’t Leah at all.
“What they did with my daughter, when they had her text me, that whole bullcrap situation they planned to get me to have a reaction? It was disgusting,” Amber said during the stream, according to The Ashley’s Reality Roundup.
To her, this was a step too far.
“That was the end of it!” she said. “I was done after that. That was the last time I ever filmed with them.”
Amber continued, “I’m dealing with the consequences! Not [the producers]! If we make mistakes, we’re dealing with the consequences, either right then and there, or later on. It’s always going to be that way.”
There has been no confirmation that MTV pushed Leah to send the text while cameras were rolling.
@teenmom "I personally can't handle it." Ready to set a boundary with Amber, Leah sends her a text 😔 #TeenMom #momsoftiktok #garyshirley ♬ original sound – Teen Mom
Amber’s sharing her opinion about how things played out on screen, but so far, there has been no other confirmation that MTV was behind the texts.
On the show, Leah admitted that she was nervous about how Amber might react to the text but seemed to believe it was necessary for her to continue to heal.
“I would say I have a hard time forgiving and forgetting and stuff like that,” she told the cameras in a confessional. “The best way for me to forgive her would be me moving on, but I’m really glad that I made my own move to actually push forward for myself and what I want, so I just hope that she’s finding a way to accept it.”
