Dethroned Miss North Carolina USA winner Brittany Boltinhouse is suing Miss USA for defamation after she was stripped of her title.
Boltinhouse, 27, is accusing pageant officials of falsely portraying her as racist, homophobic, transphobic and bigoted with their decision to remove her crown due to resurfaced social media posts in which she used racial slurs.
In the lawsuit, which was filed Sunday and seen by The Independent, Boltinhouse’s lawyers accuse pageant producers A-Blaize Productions and Miss USA president Thom Brodeur of “maliciously coordinating to publish a false public narrative portraying [her] as a racist, homophobe, and intolerable bigot to be shunned from public life.”
“Brittany Boltinhouse was not merely stripped of a title,” Boltinhouse’s attorney, Patrick Mincey, said in a statement. “She was publicly branded with a scarlet letter, accused of some of the most despicable accusations that can be lodged against another person in modern society.
“The evidence will show defendants attempted to manufacture Brittany’s false confession and, when they failed to coerce one from her, proceeded to lie in order to gin up an online mob bent on destroying a talented young woman,” Mincey said.
Representatives for the Miss USA organization and A-Blaize Productions did not immediately return The Independent’s request for comment.
Five weeks after Boltinhouse had been crowned Miss North Carolina USA, Brodeur announced August 5 that she had been stripped of her title after what he described as conduct that violated the organization’s standards had been discovered in a “thorough review of recently surfaced information.”
The review referenced unearthed social media posts from Boltinhouse between 2017 and 2019 that contained offensive language including the N-word.
Boltinhouse acknowledged the problematic posts in the complaint, but went on to claim that the real reason she had been dethroned is because of her identity as a conservative Christian.
The complaint — which was filed one day before Monday’s Miss USA kick off in Miami, Florida — referenced social media posts where Boltinhouse showed her support for Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and Andrew and Tristan Tate.
She also claimed that pageant bosses attempted to get her share an apology statement that portrayed her as bigoted.
Brodeur referenced the aforementioned apology in his own statement announcing her dethroning, saying at the time that her confession “does not undo the harm, and it does not change the outcome.”
Boltinhouse is asking for compensation for the alleged damage to her reputation, emotional distress and lost career opportunities.
After she was stripped of her title, the contest’s first runner-up Myla Hadley assumed the title of Miss North Carolina USA.
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