“I don’t care if she’s sweet,” Donald Trump said. “Tell me, who’s the most beautiful woman here?” He took notes on a little pad as he went along. He would stop in front of a girl, look her up and down, and say, “Hmmm.” Then he would go on and do the same thing to the next girl. Miss California, Carrie Prejean, recalled in her memoir the way Trump would pit the women against each other, asking them to rate each other’s looks on the spot.ĭonald Trump walked out with his entourage and inspected us closer than any general ever inspected a platoon. A few beats later, he rethought his stance, joking that, as the pageant’s owner, it might be his “obligation” to sleep with the contestants. … But, you know, it’s the kind of thing you worry about later, you tend to think about the conflict a little bit later on,” Trump joked. The same year Trump bragged to Howard Stern about barging into the dressing room while the women were changing, he declined to say whether he’d ever slept with a contestant. “We’re going to have to tell them you’re 17,” she remembers Trump saying. To succeed in the entertainment industry, Trump advised 21-year-old Taggart to lie about her age. She says he did the same thing a few months later at Trump Tower, where he had invited her to discuss her career. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s inappropriate,'” Taggart told The New York Times. I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I thought, ‘Oh my God, gross.’ He was married to Marla Maples at the time. “‘Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?'” Mahealani Lee recalls Trump saying.Īlso that year, Miss Utah, Temple Taggart, recalls Trump kissed her against her wishes.
The same year former contestants say Trump unexpectedly entered the Miss Teen USA dressing room, the reigning Miss Universe, Brook Antoinette Mahealani Lee, recalls Trump asking her about the looks of his daughter Ivanka, who was co-hosting the pageant. She told The New York Times earlier this year, “I was about to cry in that moment with all the cameras there. Trump invited reporters to observe Machado exercising, against her protests. Machado remembers him calling her “Miss Piggy” because she gained weight and “Miss Housekeeping” because she’s Latina. Hillary Clinton famously invoked Trump’s treatment of Machado during the first presidential debate.
The first Miss Universe crowned on Trump’s watch was Miss Venezuela, Alicia Machado. “They had a person that was extremely proud that a number of the women had become doctors,” Trump said. When he bought the Miss Universe pageant family, Trump told Stern in 2005, the pageant was “a sick puppy.” The relative hotness of contestants had seriously deteriorated in the preceding years, he explained to Stern, because the judges had begun placing a greater emphasis on brains over beauty. Here are other “highlights” from Trump’s storied history as a pageant creep. (Billado told BuzzFeed she mentioned the incident to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who shrugged it off, saying, “Yeah, he does that.”) And so I sort of get away with things like that,” he said. And you see these incredible-looking women. And therefore I’m inspecting it… Is everyone OK? You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. His position as the pageant’s owner entitled him to that kind of access, Trump explained, seemingly aware that what he was doing made the women uncomfortable. “I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else,” he said. The Trump campaign did not offer a response to either story, but in a 2005 appearance on Howard Stern’s show, Trump bragged about doing exactly what the women describe. “To have the owner come waltzing in, when we’re naked, or half-naked, in a very physically vulnerable position and then to have the pressure of the people that worked for him telling us to go fawn all over him, go walk up to him, talk to him, get his attention…”
Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half-naked changing into our bikinis.”ĭixon went on to say that employees of the Miss Universe Organization encouraged the contestants to lavish Trump with attention when he came in. “There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. “He just came strolling right in,” Dixon said.