Still Standing: The Untold Story of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, and Political Attacks

by Carrie Prejean

  As I said before, I had been volunteering for the Special Olympics for years. I saw no conflict in continuing with them as plain old Carrie, even while I was still Miss California. Before I was fired, the Special Olympics contacted me, reaffirming that I would be appearing as a presenter of medals to the athletes at an event. I replied that I was looking forward to the event, and that I was excited and honored to be a part of it.

  But I had made a big mistake. In a post-firing interview, I mentioned that I would be presenting at the Special Olympics over the weekend as an honorary guest. I had inadvertently given Keith yet another chance to pull the chair out from under me.

  The Special Olympics people called me back. The Miss California Organization had scheduled Tami Farrell to make her first official appearance with Special Olympics. Keith specifically asked the organization if I would be presenting awards. When they said that I would, he demanded that I be uninvited. In the interest of the athletes, I didn’t make a stink about it. They graciously offered to let me present awards the following year.

  It was a completely petty move by Keith—all so phony, so classless, and so unnecessary. Tami is a fine girl, but she had no special connection with the Special Olympics. For Keith, the Special Olympics had always been one of those tiresome requests I was always bringing up to try to make Miss California a useful agent. Now that I was out of the picture, the Miss California Organization was suddenly clamoring to claim my passion.

  Meanwhile, the intimidation campaign began to include a new dimension—legal threats. Keith’s lawyers were firing off emails, each one backed up with threats to sue. As a college student with little money, I was terrified.

  “Mr. LiMandri,” Keith said in a statement, “obviously has never watched The Apprentice if he believes that Mr. Trump could be so easily fooled. Facts are facts and we stand by them. No matter what strong wind the General Council of the National Organization on Marriage will blow, our vest of truth will stay on.” Uh, Keith, I think you meant “counsel,” not council. And thanks for the snarky, ridiculous metaphor about the wind and the vest of truth.

  I no longer had the slightest bit of respect for Keith, but Donald Trump was another matter. The Donald Trump I got to know is a little different from the hard-charging executive we see on The Apprentice. He is thoughtful, intelligent, and always adapting to the needs of the moment. Like any good businessman, he is not afraid to change his mind. And he is too smart to allow his many businesses to face the prospect of a boycott.

  After I found out I was fired, I decided I needed to talk to him. I called Donald Trump on June 20. I wanted to hear it from the man himself.

  We exchanged a few “how-are-you’s,”and then I got right to the point. I said, “I’m confused: why did I get fired?”

  “Carrie, you’re a great girl, but you know Keith said you missed over seventeen appearances, and that you weren’t cooperating. You guys just didn’t get along, Carrie.”

  Of course, I had not missed those appearances. But I couldn’t deny that Keith and I didn’t get along. Still, I didn’t think that was my doing. I hadn’t abandoned Keith when things got tough, he had abandoned me. I asked Donald about his comment, as it was quoted in the press, that I had treated him well but everyone else badly. He denied saying that: “No I said you were a good girl, but that you didn’t get along with some people.” By some people he meant Keith. Throughout the phone call I had the very clear impression that Donald knew very few of the details of what had actually been going on. He was obviously relying on Keith’s testimony, and I had the strong sense that Donald had felt pressured into approving my being fired against his better judgment. I knew he had tried to help me in the past, and he reminded me that I had once noted that the pageant business was a small part of his life. He couldn’t be on top of every little niggling problem in the organization.

  He cleared his throat. “So Carrie, tell me something, why did you miss so many appearances?”

  I asked him to remember how hard it was get anything on my schedule, even when he was forced to intervene. I didn’t miss appearances; the problem was the reverse, I couldn’t get the organization interested in them. Why was he firing me, I asked him, without even a list of “missed appearances?”

  “I don’t know . . . Carrie . . . I don’t know. You just didn’t get along.”

  But I wasn’t going to let it end there.

  “Did you see the list of appearances Keith says I missed?” I asked.

  Donald said, “No.”

  I asked him point-blank: “Mr. Trump—you fired me without making sure you had all the facts?”

  “Sorry, Carrie,” he answered. He sounded uncomfortable. “I tried to help you, but Keith says you missed seventeen appearances. I can’t have that. I have to support Keith’s decision.”

  We ended our call on a friendly note. In the months since, Donald Trump and I have talked many times. He has been very supportive and encouraging. If there is a villain in this piece, it isn’t Donald Trump. He operated based on the information he was given. It was the Miss California Organization that was relentless in its efforts to take me down.

  Throughout this controversy, the Miss California Organization had to worry about a public backlash. I wanted to put the whole controversy behind me, but the organization couldn’t; they had to keep proving that they were right and I was wrong, because, I believe, they feared that public opinion might be moving against them and in favor of me. Now they went to work to convince the press that I had never been given approval to move ahead with a book—even though it had been agreed to in principle. Moreover, up to the moment they fired me, the pageant organization had repeatedly reassured me that the supplemental contract, which would put that agreement in writing, would soon be signed and completed. Despite there being no book deal—at that time, there was no book, no manuscript, and no publisher—Keith’s lawyer said that my “participation in the admitted book deal unquestionably violates the contract and appears to be a knowing and deliberate violation.” I suppose that shows just how much Keith feared this book, or even the prospect of this book.

  How do I feel about Keith now? There are times when I feel sorry for him. Beginning with the Christina Silva fiasco, Keith has made a wreck of the Miss California Pageant. There is no doubt that my answer caused him a problem with his sponsors, though I can’t help but think that his attacks on me made things worse rather than better. Most of all, I couldn’t help but feel that Keith failed to respond to the controversy with dignity and finesse. Instead, he seemed to prefer to rely on character assassination, leaking emails, and conspiring against me with charges that were incontestably untrue.

  Keith went on Larry King Live after my firing to say that it wasn’t any one thing I did wrong, but “many, many things.” For example, Keith said, “She came to us and said, ‘I’m not interested in your input; I’ll make it my own decision what I’m going to do.’ You know, when you have a contract, when you’re working for someone, you have a responsibility to follow through on what that requirement is.”

  The take I gave Matt Lauer on my firing was, I believe, closer to the mark.

  “I’m here talking to you because of the answer I gave on that stage,” I told Matt. “It’s a test to Americans’ tolerance. Tolerance needs to be a two-way street, and it’s not. This is about me stating my beliefs about same-sex marriage, and that’s the reason why we’re here today.”

  Keith’s people still circulated the story that I was a prima donna who wouldn’t go to events. They put out the word that I had missed “tens of tens” of appearances. But I thought I could put a stop to that by calling their bluff.

  I asked Matt Lauer if Keith had specified any of the “tens and tens and tens of appearances” I had missed.

  “No, he did not talk about that,” Matt replied.

  I pointed out the absurdity of the charge. Keith was accusing me of missing “tens and tens and tens” of events in a one-month period. How could I have possibly missed—take y
our pick, “fifty-three appearances” or “tens and tens and tens” of appearances in a single month?

  After that round, after nailing the fact that they couldn’t name a single event I had missed, I was foolish enough to breathe a sigh of relief. That was that. The story was over. They couldn’t possibly continue that line of attack because they couldn’t back it up. There were no facts behind the charge. Some people might enjoy media exposure, but I had had enough; I was tremendously looking forward to getting out of the public spotlight and having some private time, which I needed, to recover from this whole terrible experience. I wanted it to end.

  Once again, though, it not only didn’t end, it got worse. The next blow hit not just me, it hit my whole family.

  Ann Coulter wrote:Finally (so far, anyway), reporters gleefully released the divorce records of Prejean’s parents. Because when you want the truth, what is more reliable than angry accusations traded in the middle of an acrimonious divorce?

  Liberals used the divorce papers to argue that Prejean had some deep-seated psychological disturbance causing her to oppose gay marriage. Symptoms of this debilitating illness include a belief in some sort of ‘god’ and a reverence for the Bible.

  Meanwhile, more of my heated emails to Keith were released to the public and got a lot of play on the internet. Hastily typed on a cell phone at gas stations and red lights, I had given Keith all the ammunition he needed to keep convincing members of the press that I was spoiled rotten. “Oh,” chimed in an Entertainment Weekly blog, “what a tangled web we weave . . . when first we leave a big ole electronic trail of evidence showing that we are kind of a huge pain in the ass.”

  As a result, the blogger wrote, I was now a “new spokeswoman for opposite employment.” (Kinda witty, that one. At least it had more class than Keith’s “vest of truth.”)

  My lawyer fired off a message to Keith’s lawyer condemning the portrayal of the Hollywood News Calendar as scheduled appearances.

  “These were NOT requests for her appearance as your client has been repeatedly, falsely, publicly stating,” he wrote. He continued:This is slander per se. The daily Hollywood News Calendar was no more a request for public appearances by Carrie than the Entertainment section of your own daily newspaper is a request for a public appearance by you. The chart that you sent us is basically a fraud as she was not declining specific requests for an appearance except for the three that I mentioned in my letter to you yesterday. How very shameful your client’s conduct is turning out to be as the plot unfolds. No wonder Carrie lost her cool with him when he forced her to go to Mr. Trump directly just to get permission to greet the troops on the USS Ronald Reagan and the Special Olympics.

  The organization’s lawyers retaliated by trying to shut me up, just as they did in threatening an “injunction” to keep me from speaking at Liberty University.

  “If Carrie Prejean wants to assert in public that she was courteous, cooperative, or professional in her conduct as Miss California USA, the history of her churlish, insolent misbehavior can be presented,” Keith’s lawyers wrote my attorney. “Instead, let me recommend that Ms. Prejean and her spokespersons acknowledge that her professed professional cooperation was nonexistent, recant the recent falsities, and avoid further public deviations from reality on the issue.”

  And if I didn’t shut up immediately, if I persisted in telling my side of the story, I was threatened with “firm action.”

  Not everyone was in the thrall of Keith, his publicists, and his lawyers. The Alabama House of Representatives passed a resolution praising me for sticking to my convictions.

  Others just opted to stay out of the way. I knew Tami Farrell held the same opinion as I do on same-sex marriage. After she became Miss California, however, she avoided the heart of the question, saying, “I don’t think that I have the right or anybody has a right to tell somebody who they can or can’t love. And I think that this is a civil rights issue. And I think that the right thing to do is let the voters decide.”

  There is nothing here to disagree with. Certainly it has never been my intention to tell people whom they could or could not love. If you look at it closely, this is a “non-answer” answer. I remember saying to the TV set, “You’re a nice girl, Tami, but you wimped out.”

  I was resolved not to wimp out. I was confident that if I had to go to court to clear my name, I could prove that I had been treated unfairly. A great case could be made that I had been illegally punished for candidly answering a question put to me at an event set up by my employer that struck at my personal religious beliefs. Certainly, an airtight case could be made that my medical privacy had been violated. At one point in the summer, I thought that Keith’s lawyers might concede all this, because it was so obvious. But in the end, nothing changed.

  Looking back, I can see that I often gave in all too easily. Keith and Shanna wanted me to have breast implants, and I let them push me into it. They wanted me not to talk about my faith so much, and at times I soft-pedaled my beliefs. They kept from me from the coronation ball, so I didn’t go.

  But at some point I learned that standing up for myself was far more important than wiggling into the tight costume of someone else’s idea of who I should be.

  I hadn’t answered “the Question” the way they wanted it answered.

  I hadn’t gone on the world media apology tour that they wanted.

  I hadn’t backed down for them.

  I got angry, but I didn’t let my anger warp me. I didn’t let my abuse at the hands of Keith, Perez Hilton, and a few others turn me into an anti-gay bigot.

  In retaliation, they had thrown everything they could at me.

  They had dug into my past, my photos, my personal emails, my parents’ divorce records. They had set up events without inviting me, only to portray me as a prima donna who fails to show up. They had fired me and called me every name in the book.

  And yet, as I look back now, I do so with peace and contentment.

  They gave me the greatest gift of all. They showed me who I really was and what I was really about. They helped me return to my core beliefs. Shanna had wanted me to stop talking about God. But in the end, I knew that if I had erred at all, it was in listening too much to people like Shanna and not enough to what really matters: the still, small voice of your own conscience. Being right with the Miss California Pageant is a lot less important than being right with God. For me, pageants had always been about competition and using that sash and tiara for good. Now I saw the whole pageant as a sham, glittering and fake. Many of the people I had worked with and the girls I competed with were wonderful. But we were trapped in a system run by petty egos, shallow values, and a sort of venomous incompetence. I was glad to be done with it, and I was only sorry that the pageant had fallen into such hands and that it might harm other young girls as it had harmed me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Gagging Free Speech

  I knew my Miss California experience would put me in touch with a lot of new places and faces. I never thought that it would involve me in the politics of the British Parliament. But it did, thanks to Alan Duncan, a leading figure in Great Britain’s Tory Party. If the Tories win the next election, its leader—David Cameron—will, of course, become the Prime Minister. It is reported in the British press that Duncan, an openly gay man, is Cameron’s choice to serve as Home Secretary, the official in charge of British police and security.

  You might think Alan Duncan has enough on his mind. But in his busy schedule, he had time to take a break and comment on a beauty pageant in the United States for BBC1’s Have I Got News for You.

  After calling me “homophobic” and a “silly bitch,” Mr. Duncan threatened to murder me.

  “If you read that Ms. California was murdered, you will know it was me, won’t you?” he said. One British internet news site reported that many viewers saw the comment as something you just don’t say, like yelling “bomb” on an airplane.

  Later, Duncan said his statement “was in jest.”
He said: “It is a comedy show after all. I’m sure Miss Prejean’s very beautiful and that if we were to meet we would love each other. I have no plans to kill her. I’ll send her a box of chocolates—unpoisoned.”

  Many times since Planet Hollywood, I have gone to search my Blackberry, worried about what I might find on the internet. The outpouring of abuse from bloggers, commentators, and others could seem at times almost overwhelming. This time I also had to wonder, “Where is Keith?” A man makes a public statement about murdering your Miss California, and you can’t bring yourself to stand in front of her and protect her? Or was he about to issue another press release, this one saying, “I can fully understand why Mr. Alan Duncan would want to murder Carrie Prejean for her extremely homophobic remarks that have no place in the Miss California family. I apologize on Carrie’s behalf and hope that Mr. Duncan will refrain from killing her.”

  When I looked up Alan Duncan online, I was a little reassured. I saw his apology. I also saw his picture. He is a dashing man in a well-made suit. If I ever go to London, I think I actually would like to meet him. Not only do I expect to be perfectly safe, I bet he would be a pleasant and witty person to get to know. I am sure we would, in fact, “love each other.” But I’d also like to ask him a few questions.

  You do know, don’t you Mr. Duncan, that the answer I gave was the answer given by most of the people of my state, my fellow Californians, the entire United States? Do you feel the same way about them?

  And do you really believe that our answer on marriage reveals us as fearful and even hateful towards gay people?

  I’d also ask this well-educated Englishman what he thinks “homophobic” really means anyway, besides being a slur on anyone who opposes a politicized gay agenda.

  If you ever get bored, look up “homo” in the dictionary: it means “man” as in Homo Sapiens or “the same” as in homogenous, so to be “homophobic” really means to be fearful of men, which I’m not, or fearful of things being the same, which is a fear I think few people have. “Homophobic” is merely a made-up word to try to force everyone to be politically correct on gay marriage or risk being accused of being hateful.