Leah Messer has been through a lot in her years with the Teen Mom franchise.
We’ve seen Leah go through a divorce, battle addiction, and help one of her kids battle serious health issues — and then there’s everything that happened with Jaylan Mobley in the last year.
But the benefit of enduring all this turmoil in the public eye is that Leah did a lot money through his involvement with MTV.
Unfortunately, it seems no one told her that she was supposed to give some of that money to the IRS!
Yes, according to a new report from The Ashley’s Reality Roundup, Leah was hit with yet another lien from the IRS, bringing her total tax debt to $780,000.
The new lien is in the amount of $290,297, due to unpaid federal taxes for the years 2018, 2020 and 2021.
We don’t know if Leah has filed her 2022 return yet — the deadline was in April, though she may have requested an extension — but it’s safe to assume she’s racked up even more debt last year!
Obviously, that’s a lot of money for anyone to owe under any circumstances.
But Leah’s case is more serious than those of most other celebrities who are deeply in debt with the tax authorities.
As we mentioned earlier, she made a ton of money during her time on MTV — over $350,000 from the network and, by some estimates, an additional $200,000 from sponsored content deals.
But the sauce train will probably stop in the relatively near future.
Ratings for the Teen Mom franchise have been declining for several years now.
Currently it seems that Teen Mom: The Next Chapter will return for at least one more season, but Teen mom family reunion And Teen Mom: Girls’ Night Out — two shows Leah was a regular cast member on — seem to have gotten the axe.
Leah’s salary will therefore be lower this year than last year – and it seems likely that her employment at MTV will end entirely in the very near future.
As for how she ended up in this mess, Leah says she was far too generous in her early years as a reality TV star.
“I always want people to know that I’m always that humble person and I felt [that] give to everyone, I would get back… but in the end it still hurt me,” she said during a recent appearance on Kailyn Lowry’s “Coffee Convos” podcast.
“It hurt me, like, it caused one of my divorces, with Jeremy [Calvert], because I would give to everyone. I gave $40,000 to my dad, just to keep my dad around…”.
Leah also said she’s shelled out large sums of money to allow her friends and family “to have cars and houses and this and that”.
Hopefully some of the people she helped will be able to reciprocate this generosity in the years to come.
Because it looks like Leah could use all the help she can get.
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