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Miss USA scandal and secret messages
Drama is brewing in the pageant community after Miss USA and Miss Teen USA recently returned their crowns and issued cryptic statements announcing their resignations.
On Monday, Noelia Voigt, who became the first Venezuelan American to win Miss USA in September 2023, posted statement on Instagram, saying he was stepping down for “mental health.” According to armchair detectives, the message also contained a hidden cry for help; it was widely noted that the first letter of the first 11 sentences of Voigt’s resignation statement read “I am silenced”.
“We have to listen carefully because someone is trying to tell us something important,” TikTok influencer AnnaNoel Olsen said in a viral video regarding Voigt’s publication. “I can’t even begin to imagine how many contracts, NDAs, all the things she’s under. She put this out there for someone to understand.
There sure seems to be something rotten going on with Miss USA. Within 48 hours of Voigt’s resignation, Miss Teen USA followed suit. In an Instagram post, Miss Teen USA, UmaSofia Srivastava, said her “personal values are no longer fully aligned with the direction of [Miss USA]”.
While Voigt and Srivastava have been tight-lipped about what’s going on, Claudia Michel, who resigned from her role as Miss USA’s social media director last week, has been much more open. In a statement posted on Instagram, Michelle noted that she hasn’t signed any contracts or NDAs, so she’s “in a position to speak about what I’ve witnessed.” Which, to paraphrase Michelle, is a toxic and chaotic organization that didn’t pay her in her first two months or give her the tools to do her job. Michelle also hinted that Miss USA and Miss Teen USA were treated unprofessionally by the organization and said, “I reject workplace toxicity and any form of harassment.”
Miss USA responded to Michelle’s claims saying he was “disturbed to hear the false allegations made by a former Miss USA employee.”
While it’s not entirely clear what’s going on at Miss USA, the suggestion that it might be a toxic work environment hardly comes as much of a surprise. For all the nonsense about contest celebrating more than outer beauty and as some kind of women’s empowerment organization, it’s still very much about putting women’s bodies on display. It’s hard to escape misogyny when it’s at the core of your brand.
This, of course, is also not the first time the world of beauty pageants has been hit by scandals – they are a regular occurrence. Last year, for example, the global organizer of the Miss Universe beauty pageant cut ties with the Indonesian franchise after several allegations of sexual harassment. Organizers allegedly asked contestants to strip down to their underwear to check for “scars and cellulite”.
Donald Trump, who has owned the Miss Universe Organization, which includes Miss USA and Miss Teen USA, since 1996. until 2015, has also been accused of harassing contestants. A number of former Miss Teen USA contestants (some of whom were as young as 15 at the time) said Trump walked in on them as they changed. Trump has also publicly bragged about doing similar things. “I’ll tell you the funniest thing is I’ll go backstage before a show and everybody’s getting dressed,” Trump told Howard Stern. “There’s no men anywhere and I’m allowed in because I’m the owner of the pageant … and so I kind of get away with stuff like that.”
One of the reasons powerful men like Trump have been allowed to “get away with it” is because they know how to use the law as a weapon and use it tools such as non-disclosure agreements to imprison their victims. In recent years, fueled by the #MeToo movement, there has been a crackdown on abuse of privacy clauses to protect the careers of abusers. There has been a lot of progress in this regard: including Speak openly2022 law limiting the enforcement of nondisclosure agreements in sexual harassment disputes. Yet, as the Miss USA scandal seems to stand, the victims of misogyny are still being silenced.
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On the Victorian custom of cutting mothers out of portraits
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Missouri seems really wedded to child marriage
The bill to ban all child marriage is stalled thanks to – you guessed it – a bunch of family values loving Republicans.
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Female climate scientists are careful about starting families
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The Week in the Patriarchate*
Want to share your home with a chamois? The mayor of Alicudi, a small island in Sicily’s beautiful Aeolian archipelago, has got you covered. There are about 600 goats roaming the island (a 6:1 ratio of goats to people) and he tries to give them away. Search for the animals is now out of supply and the mayor’s next challenge is to try to find someone who can put a goat on a boat.
* I know goats don’t have paws, they have cloven hooves, but just a goat with them, okay?
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