Gregg-Reuters Miss Nebraska Teresa Scanlan (R), 17, reacts after being announced Miss America 2011 during the Miss America Pageant in Las Vegas, Nevada on Jan. Lucas Jackson-Reuters Miss Oklahoma Jennifer Berry reacts with Miss Georgia Monica Pang (R) after being named Miss America 2006 at the conclusion of the Miss America pageant in Las Vegas on Jan. Isaac Brekken-AP Miss America contestant, Miss New York Nina Davuluri reacts after being chosen winner of the 2014 Miss America Pageant as 2013 Miss America Mallory Hagan places a tiara on her head in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Sept. Charles Rex Aebogast-AP Miss New York Mallory Hytes Hagan reacts as she is announced Miss America 2013 on Saturday, Jan. Reuters Former Miss America Angela Perez Baraquio, top, crowns Miss Oregon Katie Harman as Miss America 2002, during the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, N.J. Read more from 1984, here in the TIME archives: There She Goes, Miss America See The 10 Funniest Faces of Past Miss America Winners Miss America 1999 Nicole Johnson (R) from Virginia reacts with first runner up Kelli Bradshaw (L) from North Carolina, after Johnson was named Miss America 1999 in Atlantic City, New Jersey on Sept. “So many people have gotten burned by those people that I think they’ll eventually get it in the end and die a slow, painful death.” “I just wanted to get on with my life,” she told People in 1989. Playboy, meanwhile, took the moral high ground: it had been offered the photos first, but turned them down partly in deference to Williams - and partly because, per TIME, “it does not use what Spokesman Dave Salyers calls lesbian material.” The pageant’s organizers were aghast at the images, which appeared in Penthouse’s September 1984 issue with the headline, “Miss America: Oh, God, She’s Nude!” The magazine’s publisher had little compunction about printing them over Williams’ objections. TIME reported that the photographer was paid more than Penthouse had ever paid for a photo spread before. The photographer had assured her at the time, she told People, that the photos were merely silhouettes, in which she’d be unidentifiable and that they would never leave the studio.īut they did leave the studio, partly because she was identifiable: photos of Miss America in compromising positions, some of them involving another nude woman, were worth their weight in gold. On this day, July 23, in 1984, then-21-year-old Williams handed over her crown - making her both the first black Miss America and the first to give up the title - after Penthouse announced that it would publish raunchy photos she had posed for two years earlier while working as a photographer’s assistant. It might have been the lowest point in her life, as she told People in 1984, but the scandal that led Vanessa Williams to resign her post as Miss America also set her up for one of the greatest comebacks in entertainment history.
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