Miss Universe and Miss Teen USA: Documented Sexual Misconduct and Dressing Room Violations

Overview

Donald Trump did not just describe the sexual entitlement documented in the Access Hollywood tape in the abstract. He also described, in his own words to Howard Stern, a specific mechanism for acting on it: owning a beauty pageant.

"I'll go backstage before a show and everyone's getting dressed and ready and everything else," Trump told Stern in 2005, "and you know, no men are anywhere. And I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant, and therefore I'm inspecting it."

The "inspection" involved women with no clothes on.

The Miss Teen USA Problem

The adult contestants of the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants were eighteen and older. The contestants of Miss Teen USA were not. Multiple former Miss Teen USA contestants confirmed that Trump entered their changing area backstage, in some cases when contestants were as young as fifteen.

Mariah Billado, Miss Vermont Teen USA 1997, said she remembered rushing to put on her dress when Trump entered: "Oh my god, there's a man in here." When she and other contestants expressed their concern, they were told Trump owned the pageant and could do what he wanted.

The ownership structure gave Trump an explicit claim of access that contestants could not realistically refuse without jeopardizing their competition. It was a structural power imbalance: object to the owner's presence and you might not compete. The bragging to Howard Stern confirmed Trump was fully aware of the asymmetry and considered it a perk.

The Pattern

The pageant behavior fits within the broader pattern documented by E. Jean Carroll's jury verdict, the Access Hollywood tape, and the accounts of more than 25 other women who described similar conduct by Trump across several decades. The consistent element is structural power — ownership, fame, wealth — being used to override women's reasonable expectations of privacy and consent.