Ms. Nevada 2019 winner Katie Williams was stripped of her title ahead of the national Ms. America competition on Saturday and claims she was booted from the pageant because she supports President Trump.
Williams, 29, who was crowned in April, said in a Facebook video that her disqualification was effective as of Sunday.
“I just don’t understand how you can censor someone with conservative values when I’m not even really saying anything that’s bad,” Williams said in the Monday video. “If I had more liberal views, less conservative views, [then] this wouldn’t be an issue.”
Ms. America Pageant wrote in a statement that Williams is “distorting the facts” regarding her disqualification, adding that their competition is a “No Politics pageant.” It added that officials gave Williams a deadline to edit her pages, but that she refused, proving she is “no longer capable of representing this pageant as Ms. Nevada.”{mosads}
“ALL the pageant asked of Ms. Williams, in writing, is to keep separate social media accounts,” the organization wrote. “She has her Personal Facebook page to voice her political views. However, the Ms. Nevada Facebook Page should be devoid of political content.”
Williams, a vocal Trump supporter, claimed she did create a second Facebook account for Ms. Nevada, adding that a pageant official “continued to screenshot my page — my personal page — and email me about how she was disappointed and she didn’t agree with it and that I needed to speak with her on the phone.”
Ms. America CEO Susan Jeske told NBC News that while Williams did make a separate page for her pageant material, her personal Facebook had political and pageant content, which also made it a “pageant page” that put her in breach of the rules.
Williams’s profile picture on her personal Facebook page shows her wearing a red Trump 2020 hat, and several posts to her profile are of a political nature. On Saturday, she posted a screenshot of a tweet she wrote that called antifa a “Terrorist Organization” and its supporters “Anti-American.”
Earlier this month, she wrote in a post that birth control “isn’t a right”: “Men buy condoms, women can buy birth control.”
The news follows Miss Michigan 2019 winner Kathy Zhu, an open Trump supporter, being stripped of her title last month for what the Miss World America organization deemed “offensive, insensitive and inappropriate” social media posts.
Ms. America Pageant is a separate pageant organization from Miss World America.