Beauty is within the eye of the beholder. And for the scandal-ridden Miss Universe pageant, that is proving a giant a part of the issue.
Opaque and subjective voting standards have made it troublesome to untangle the online of allegations surrounding this year’s finale. The query of whether or not Miss Mexico, Fátima Bosch, ought to have received is not about how she carried out on stage — it’s about allegations of vote-rigging, secrecy and favoritism.
One of the competition judges, Omar Harfouch, has made a plethora of damaging claims on social media since resigning from his publish days earlier than final Friday’s finale.
Among them, the Lebanese-French composer claimed 30 finalists had been preselected in a “secret vote” by an “impromptu jury” comprising of people not on the official judging panel (an allegation the Miss Universe Organization denied). Perhaps extra controversially, he stated that Bosch’s victory was additionally pre-scripted, influenced by enterprise ties between the pageant’s co-owner and president of the Miss Universe Organization, Raúl Rocha Cantú, and the Mexican beauty queen’s father.
Neither the Miss Universe Organization nor Rocha Cantú’s lawyer responded to NCS’s requests for remark. On the latter declare, Rocha Cantú told Mexican journalist Adela Micha {that a} contract his firm held with Mexico’s state-owned oil firm Pemex, to whom Bosch’s father is an advisor, was awarded through a good public bidding course of that predates his co-ownership of the Miss Universe pageant. Pemex said in an announcement on X that it had a brief contract with firms linked to Rocha Cantú in 2023, though it emphasised that the connection not exists.
Off-stage drama additional engulfed the pageant on Wednesday when Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office introduced that Rocha Cantú is being investigated for alleged connections to an organized crime community engaged in drug trafficking, arms trafficking and gas theft. Rocha Cantú’s lawyer didn’t reply to NCS’s requests for touch upon these allegations, both.
The pageant boss has, nonetheless, posted a number of statements and movies to social media in current days condemning the opposite claims. In a defiant three-part Instagram publish Rocha Cantú denied Harfouch’s allegations, calling him an “opportunist” exploiting the claims to “gain followers.”
The fallout has been disastrous for the pageant’s organizers. Ivory Coast delegate and fourth runner-up, Olivia Yacé, who many viewers felt ought to have received the crown (and who Harfouch stated was excluded from competition “solely because she might face visa issues”), has since renounced her Miss Universe Africa and Oceania title, saying in a carefully-worded assertion that she wished to “remain true” to her values.
Shortly after, Rocha Cantú appeared to concede that the power of rivals’ passports was amongst “many things to take into consideration.” Discussing Yacé’s Ivorian citizenship, in his interview with Micha, he added: “She’s going to be the Miss Universe who spent a whole year in an apartment because of the cost of the visa process with lawyers. Some of them require six months’ notice. The year’s already gone, right?”
And even previous to the finale, the pageant had been beset with controversy. Earlier within the month, a Thai pageant director berated Bosch throughout a pre-pageant assembly, triggering a mass walkout of contestants.
Reputation for scandal
Often sitting on the intersection of politics and nationwide delight, pageants have confirmed to be magnets for scandal. This year’s debacle is simply the most recent going through Miss Universe, its rivals and its world franchises, the community of nationwide contests that choose every nation’s consultant.
In the final 5 years alone, native organizers have confronted allegations of discriminatory entry requirements (France), sexual harassment (Indonesia) and xenophobia (South Africa). At Miss USA, in the meantime, 2023 winner Noelia Voigt resigned her publish through a cryptic psychological health-related social media post seemingly containing the message “I am silenced,” spelled out with the primary letters of the opening 11 sentences, sparking rumors of a strict non-disclosure settlement. Days later Miss Teen USA forfeited her title, too.
The form of controversies surrounding 2025’s Miss Universe are “not at all new” in pageantry, stated Hilary Levey Friedman, a sociologist and creator of “Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America.”
“People have long said, ‘Oh my gosh, it was fixed,’ or ‘They knew someone,’ or ‘There’s this conflict of interest,’” she stated, including that enterprise pursuits are, additionally, nothing new. “These pageants have really always had a strong commercial past, and always had a tradition of men owning them and women competing.”
Miss Universe, which was co-owned by Donald Trump from 1996 to 2015 is, above all, a enterprise. Organizers could arguably have an ethical obligation to equity, and an obligation of care to contestants, however the competitors’s integrity is, primarily, a matter of status. “It is not a public institution,” Rocha Cantú reminded his critics on Instagram earlier this week. “We do not receive public funds or sponsorships from any public entity.”
In current years, the column inches devoted to pageant controversies have seemingly outweighed curiosity within the contests themselves. This raises the inevitable query: does anyone actually care?
Miss Universe could also be often called the “Super Bowl” of pageants, however this year’s finale was not even broadcast on English-language tv within the US. (It was solely obtainable there through streaming, though Telemundo carried stay protection in Spanish.) “That is just such a wildly enormous difference from 20 years ago, let alone 50 years ago,” stated Friedman, including: “Viewership is so down, but press coverage of the scandals is so high. It’s just fascinating.”
Widely criticized by feminists, and others, for selling singular beauty requirements and archaic notions of womanhood, the contests’ decline factors to wider societal shifts. Whether beauty pageants — occasions that, virtually by definition, objectify ladies — ought to have any position in right now’s world is a matter of debate. But even those that help their ongoing presence would possibly wrestle to argue that features of the contests will not be hopelessly outdated.
Recent adjustments to Miss Universe’s guidelines, whereas billed as modernizing, lag a long time behind the instances. New rules lastly permitting over-28s, moms and married ladies to take part — a concession made, astonishingly, on this decade — had been hardly revolutionary. The pageant’s swimsuit (learn: bikini) contest in the meantime endures, years after competitions like Miss World and Miss America ditched theirs in favor of marginally extra demure alternate options, equivalent to athleisure parades.
But Friedman pointed to a basic conflict between makes an attempt to modernize and the “glitz and glamour” the occasions depend on to draw audiences. “They’ve tried to become more academic, more focused on ‘platform’ issues like social service, that sort of thing,” she stated. “But that’s not super exciting to watch, right?”
“I just think there’s so many different opportunities for women these days,” stated Friedman, who can be the daughter of Miss America 1970, the late Pamela Eldred. “In the past, when they were so popular, it was partially because women just didn’t have as many outlets to pursue their ambition, to pursue career paths and that sort of thing. And so, I guess on some level, you could say pageants are a victim of their own success.”
For Miss Universe, a direct balm may be the introduction of clearer voting standards and auditing processes. The pageant’s organizers had beforehand requested accounting agency Ernst & Young to supervise voting, although it’s unclear whether or not this year’s contest was audited (or in that case, by whom). Critics rapidly identified that the outcomes had been learn from a easy piece of paper quite than faraway from a sealed envelope, as was as soon as the norm. The Miss Universe Organization didn’t reply to NCS’s request for readability on the matter.
It could merely be too late for giant pageants to reform their manner again to mainstream cultural relevance. But dismissing their future solely ignores the excessive esteem through which they’re held in lots of nations exterior the West — within the Philippines, for example, the place pageantry has a near-national-sport standing.
Supporters additionally level out that many beauty queens use their platforms to advocate and fundraise for charitable causes; some have used pageants to elevate themselves and their households out of poverty. This year’s Miss Philippines Ahtisa Manalo, for example, says she paid college fees although a mix of scholarships and pageant prize cash.
Let us not neglect, too, that it’s usually the ladies themselves, not organizers, that suffer throughout these scandals. Earlier this week, Bosch posted screenshots of the litany of abusive messages despatched to her by social media customers sad with final Friday’s end result. “In recent days, I have received insults, attacks and even death threats for one reason only: because I won,” she wrote on Instagram.
But Bosch’s skill to talk out exemplifies a technique through which pageantry is, Friedman stated, altering for the higher. If social media is more and more the supply of controversy for franchise house owners, it has concurrently empowered contestants by increasing their platforms and permitting them to boost issues publicly.
“I think what’s different is that people now have a way to get their message out in a way they didn’t before,” Friedman stated, including: “The #MeToo movement and centering of women’s narratives has led to women having more of a public voice. And ironically, or not, that has happened in pageantry as well.”