What’s Going On With Miss USA Is Truly Wild

Wild things are happening at the Miss USA pageant, according to Constance Grady, who reports on culture over at Vox. Both Miss USA and Miss Teen USA stepped down last week, within days of each other and with just three months left of their reigns. “It’s the first time anything like this has ever happened in the pageant’s history,” Grady said.

How did things inside the Miss USA pageant get so bad, all at once?

The beauty queens who are abdicating their thrones here have, for the most part, released vague statements explaining themselves. It’s only because of leaked documents and interviews with their families that we know more: allegations of bullying, a toxic work environment, sexual harassment.

We went back to the pageant itself to look for clues. Unlike, say, Miss America, Miss USA is really all about appearance. There’s no talent portion of the competition. “The Miss USA pageant is like the most glamorous graduation ceremony you’ve ever seen in your life,” Grady said. When the women do talk, there’s a lot of chummy talk about unity and being a force for good. It’s kind of ironic. “That’s one of the things that has made a lot of the pageant folks I’ve talked to really angry,” Grady said. “This is supposed to be an organization that empowers women.”

On a recent episode of What Next, we looked at why the chaos at Miss USA has been brewing for years. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: Can you step back a little bit and put Miss USA in context for me? In the world of American beauty pageants, how big of a deal is Miss USA?

Constance Grady: Miss USA is an interesting case. Within the country, it’s a little bit of an also-ran. Most people know Miss America.

Who typically wins the Miss USA contest?

The winner of Miss USA tends to be someone who is trying to position herself for a career in a presentation-focused field. Miss America is a scholarship competition, but Miss USA is more career-focused. Miss USA gets a six-figure salary, she gets a car, she gets an apartment, and she does a lot of public appearances at prestigious events like New York Fashion Week, the Kentucky Derby, places where she’s supposed to be able to network and make connections.

Even before the resignations of two beauty queens in one week, industry insiders knew something was amiss with the Miss USA pageant. That’s because Miss USA herself, Noelia Voigt, seemed hard to find for months. She wasn’t making her usual appearances. Then there was a slew of mysterious internal firings. The social media director for Miss USA resigned, saying she hadn’t been paid for a couple of months. It’s safe to say the vibes were bad when Noelia Voigt went on Instagram to toss aside her crown.

Noelia Voigt posts on Instagram, saying that she is stepping down in order to prioritize her mental health. But when you take the first letter of the first 11 sentences of the post, they spell out the phrase “I am silenced.” Of course, she has not commented on this publicly, and it seems unlikely that she will while she’s under an NDA.

Then, inside of a few days, Miss Teen USA also relinquishes her title. We should lay out how closely knitted together these two titleholders are. Both contests happened in the same week. They’re presented as a pair.

Absolutely. It’s also not uncommon for Miss Teen USA to go on to win the title of Miss USA a few years later. It’s sort of Barbie and Skipper.

Tell me about Miss Teen USA’s resignation post. Because like Miss USA, it’s dramatic. She quotes Nietzsche in it.

UmaSofia Srivastava is Miss Teen USA. She posts her note to Instagram. It has a Nietzsche quote at the top. She does not have an acrostic in hers, but she does say directly, “My personal values no longer fully aligned with the direction of the organization.” This is as clear as you can get under the terms of the NDA to be like there are things happening within the walls of the institution that are not kosher, that are something that a cute 17-year-old who ran on a platform of diversity and anti-bullying would say is not something that she agrees with.

Things started to become more clear in the days after the resignations, both because Miss USA’s resignation letter leaked to the press, and she’s more specific in that letter. And then, both women’s mothers spoke out on Good Morning America this week. Tell me about the specific allegations we learned about in the following days.

Noelia Voigt’s resignation letter has come out in fragments on NBC. She alleges that there is a toxic work environment within the Miss USA organization that has badly affected both her physical health and her mental health. She says she’s now in treatment for anxiety. She says she’s experienced heart palpitations, full body shakes, loss of appetite, unintentional weight loss, loss of sleep, loss of hair, and more.

There’s this one really serious allegation about sexual harassment. Tell me about that.

Noelia Voigt says that she was making a public appearance and that she was not protected in any way by a handler or a security person. She says that she’s at this Christmas parade, and she gets into her car with a man who, according to her mother on Good Morning America, says, “Do you like old men with money?”

Yikes. 

And there’s no one present, according to Voigt, to protect her in that moment. She says that she goes to Laylah Rose, the president of the organization, and Rose’s response is, “We can’t prevent people from saying things to you at public appearances. It is part of the role that you’re in as a public figure.”

This name keeps coming up as we talk about Miss USA: Laylah Rose. Can you tell me a little bit about her? Because it seems like a lot of the allegations swirl around her in particular.

Laylah Rose just took over the organization last year. She’s very new to the job. Before this, she was working in fashion. And a lot of the allegations about the organization specifically point to Laylah Rose. In Voigt’s resignation letter, she says that Laylah Rose threatened to take away her salary whenever Voigt did something that Rose disagreed with. She says a lot of times it was minor things like posting to social media, and the expectations were never clearly communicated to her. She also says that at one point, she was scheduled to throw the opening pitch at a baseball game, and Laylah Rose said that she hoped Voigt would be hit in the face by a ball.

I don’t get that. The organization is called “the Miss USA pageant,” right? The whole point is to have a Miss USA. Why would you antagonize the person who’s literally wearing the crown?

It’s a really good question, and one of the things that’s very puzzling about this situation. But there’s this sense that, in fact, Miss USA is replaceable. It doesn’t necessarily matter who is wearing the crown at any given moment as long as there’s someone. They have already announced that one of the runners up will be taking over the title, and the social media pages are now all about the new Miss USA.

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How has the Miss USA organization responded to all these allegations about what it’s like to work there? They’re getting hit from all sides.

The Miss USA organization has been pretty close-mouthed. They have mostly just said, We are committed to the mental health of our winners. We’re committed to empowering women. And they’ve been trying to move on to the next thing, announcing the replacement titleholders and getting ready for the next Miss USA pageant, which will be in November.

Do their actions reflect the spirit of empowering women? Their social media was sort of trollishly posting, here’s people who won in certain categories who weren’t Miss USA.

Yes, this was shocking. Allegedly, Laylah Rose was forbidden from speaking directly to Miss Teen USA. Her parents felt that she was talking to her inappropriately and demanded that all communication go through them. And shortly afterward, images start appearing on the Miss USA Instagram, where they are congratulating runners up who won in the specific categories that the titleholders did not win. Congratulations that you won, but you did not win bathing suit. There’s certainly a mean girl–ishness to this that feels more like evil sorority president—petty and mean, rather than necessarily in the spirit of uplifting women, as the organization says is its mission.

An interesting thing I learned from your reporting is just how troubled Miss USA has been and for how long. One of the few things Americans may know about Miss USA is that it was owned by Donald Trump, but he was forced to sell the franchise. First of all, why was he forced to sell it?

When Trump first made his presidential campaign announcement speech, infamously, in 2015, NBC cut ties with him. At the time, he co-owned the Miss Universe franchise with NBC. He was forced to buy back their shares, and then he couldn’t afford to own the whole thing, so he sells it, eventually, in 2016.

After that, Miss USA goes through four corporate overlords in eight years. And the executive suite has also been a game of musical chairs.

Crystle Stewart was the president before Laylah Rose. She ends up being forced to resign in disgrace after two allegations. Multiple competitors claim that she rigged the competition in favor of her alleged favorite, Miss Texas. Crystle Stewart had been a Miss USA before and she had also been Miss Texas.

There is also a much more serious allegation, which mostly concerns her husband. His name is Max Sebrechts. He is the vice president of Miss USA. Multiple contestants allege that Sebrechts sexually harassed them. There are screencaps of letters, lots of eyewitness accounts, emails—pretty damning evidence. Both Sebrechts and Crystle Stewart end up having to step down after all of that comes out.

It just seems like this organization is no longer functioning.

It is certainly in a very bizarre place right now. There are a lot of people who have love for this organization and say that it’s made a big difference in their lives. And I want to take them at their word on that, but it certainly seems as though we are in a situation where this organization that allegedly exists to help and empower young women instead has been harassing and exploiting them and then locking them down with these NDAs so they can’t even complain about it.

I’ve certainly been circling around the idea that it may just not be possible to have a competition that is in large part about ranking women by how good they look in a swimsuit that also is empowering to them. The pageant is fundamentally about the evaluation and control of the bodies of very young women, and that’s a really vulnerable situation for those women to be in.