Scandal and secret messages at Miss USA
Drama is afoot in the pageant community, after both Miss USA and Miss Teen USA recently handed back their crowns and issued cryptic statements announcing their resignations.
On Monday, Noelia Voigt, who became the first Venezuelan American woman to win Miss USA in September 2023, posted a statement on Instagram saying she was stepping down for her “mental health”. According to armchair detectives, the message also contained a hidden cry for help; it was widely observed that the first letter of the first 11 sentences of Voigt’s resignation statement spelled out “I am silenced.”
“We need to listen carefully, because someone is trying to tell us something important,” the TikTok influencer AnnaNoel Olsen said in a viral video about Voigt’s post. “I can’t even imagine how many contracts, NDAs, all the things she is under. Her putting this in there was so someone would find out.”
There certainly seems to be something rotten going on at 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 no longer fully align with the direction of [Miss USA]”.
While Voigt and Srivastava have both been tight-lipped about what’s going on, Claudia Michelle, who resigned from her role as Miss USA’s social media director last week, has been rather more open. In a statement posted on Instagram, Michelle noted that she hadn’t signed any contracts or NDAs so was “in the position to speak on what I have witnessed”. Which, to paraphrase Michelle, is a toxic and chaotic organization that didn’t pay her for the first two months or give her the tools needed to do her job. Michelle also insinuated that Miss USA and Miss Teen USA had been treated unprofessionally by the organization and said: “I disavow workplace toxicity and bullying of any kind.”
Miss USA has responded to Michelle’s claims by saying it was “troubled to hear the false accusations 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 a huge surprise. For all the guff about the pageant celebrating more than just outer beauty and being some sort of women’s empowerment organization, it’s still very much about putting women’s bodies on show. It’s hard to escape misogyny when it’s very much the core of your brand.
This, of course, also isn’t the first time the beauty pageant world has been hit by scandal – they are a regular occurrence. Last year, for example, the global organizer of the Miss Universe beauty pageant cut ties with the Indonesia franchise after several claims of sexual harassment. Organizers allegedly asked contestants to strip to their underwear to check for “scars and cellulite”.
Donald Trump, who owned the Miss Universe Organization, which includes Miss USA and Miss Teen USA, from 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) have said that Trump walked in on them while they were changing. Trump also publicly bragged about doing this sort of thing. “I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed,” Trump told Howard Stern. “No men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in, because I’m the owner of the pageant … and so I sort of get away with things like that.”
One reason that powerful men like Trump have been allowed to “get away with things like that” is because they know how to weaponize the law and use tools like non-disclosure agreements to shut down their victims. In recent years, spurred by the #MeToo movement, there has been a crackdown on the misuse of confidentiality clauses to protect the careers of abusers. There has been a lot of progress in this regard: including the Speak Out Act, a 2022 law limiting the enforcement of non-disclosure agreements in sexual harassment disputes. Still, as the Miss USA scandal seems to show, victims of misogyny are still being silenced.
Nigeria’s women drivers rally together to navigate male-dominated industry
The Ladies on Wheel Association of Nigeria started six years ago with just six women. Now there are 5,000 female commercial drivers in the organization, all of whom regularly look out for each other on the road. Unfortunately, the increase in female drivers in Nigeria isn’t so much a story of burgeoning gender equality but of a worsening economy: women are having to find more ways to earn money in the informal sector.
On the Victorian custom of cutting mothers out of portraits
Lithub has a fascinating piece on this creepy practice and the way it relates to modern motherhood.
Missouri seems really wedded to child marriage
A bill to ban all child marriage has stalled thanks to – you guessed it – a bunch of family values-loving Republicans.
Can AI usher in an age of ethical pornography?
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is thinking about letting users “responsibly” create artificial intelligence-generated pornography. Figuring out how to do this is quite the challenge.
Horrific new details emerge of ethnic cleansing in Darfur
Human Rights Watch has collated hundreds of witness statements describing atrocities by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, including children being “piled up and shot”.
Louisiana university cancels graduation address by UN ambassador over Gaza
It really doesn’t matter if we have more minorities and women in positions of power, if those women then uphold an inequitable status quo. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, whose commencement address at Xavier University of Louisiana was cancelled after objections by outraged students, is a depressing example of this. The US ambassador to the UN will forever be remembered for raising her hand to veto ceasefire resolution after ceasefire resolution in Gaza – despite experts warning of famine and genocide – and talking about a “final solution”. On a more positive note, if you want to see an inspiring commencement speaker, go watch Dr Ruha Benjamin’s speech at Spelman College.
US rapper Macklemore releases a song called Hind’s Hall
Named for the six-year-old girl murdered in Gaza, all proceeds from the song go to support Unrwa. This isn’t the first time Macklemore has advocated for social causes: his 2012 track Same Love supported marriage equality and the rapper has also talked about his white privilege and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Female climate scientists wary of starting families
A fifth of the 97 female climate scientists who responded to an exclusive Guardian survey said they had opted not to have children or to have fewer children than they’d like in order to reduce their impact on the planet. Seven per cent of the 263 male scientists who responded said they had either no children or fewer than they would otherwise have had.
The week in pawtriarchy*
Looking to share your home with a feral goat? 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 goat-to-human ratio) and he’s been trying to give them away. Demand for the animals has now outstripped supply and the mayor’s next challenge is trying to find someone who can get a goat on a boat.
* I know that goats don’t have paws, they have cloven hooves, but just goat with it, OK?
