A day after Donald Trump allowed Miss California Carrie Prejean to keep her crown following a semi-nude photo scandal, Shanna Moakler resigned from her post at the organization.
“Since the press conference yesterday, I had a chance to think about what has taken place, and I feel that at this time it is in my best interest to resign from the Miss California USA organization,” Shanna released in a statement to Access Hollywood. Up until her resignation, Shanna held the co-Executive Director post at the Miss California Organization.
Shanna continued on that following yesterday’s press conference, she lost faith in the organization.
“I can not with a clear conscious move forward supporting and promoting the Miss Universe Organization when I no longer believe in it, or the contracts I signed committing myself as a youth,” Shanna’s statement continued. “I want to be a role model for young woman (sic) with high hopes of pageantry, but now feel it more important to be a role model for my children. I am sorry and hope I have not let any young supporters down but wish them the best of luck in fulfilling their dreams.”
Miss California co-executive director Keith Lewis offered a statement of support for Shanna to Access following the news on Wednesday.
“Shanna has and will continue to be a large part of my life, although I am sad she has come to this decision, I will always respect the convictions, that brought her to this place,” he said.
Despite racy photos of the beauty queen that surfaced on TheDirty.com last week and new topless photos that surfaced on TMZ.com on Tuesday, which showed Prejean posing without a shirt, Trump allowed the beauty queen to retain her title.
“We’ve reviewed the pictures very carefully… we are in the 21st century and I talked about relevance and the pageants have been updated tremendously. And Carrie is a model, she’s a very successful model, we have determined – and we have the absolute right under the contract – we have determined that the pictures taken are fine,” Trump said at Tuesday’s press conference. “So, we’ve made a determination that everything we’ve seen to this date that she’s done, some were risque, but again, we’re in the 21st century, so we’ve made a determination that the pictures taken were acceptable they were fine in many cases. They were lovely pictures and in some cases they were modeling pictures, so I think that’s very important to understand.”
Trump also addressed the strife between the co-directors of the Miss California USA, Shanna Moakler and Keith Lewis, and Prejean.
“The last thing… is we have Keith and Shannon from the pageant, the directors of the Miss California pageant. I met them today for the first time…they were having some miscommunication with Carrie. The communication, I believe, is totally solved. They are really getting along very well,” Trump said on Tuesday. “They’ve been meeting for hours in my office and I really think that they are and have developed a relationship that they didn’t have before. Carrie will remain Miss California. She, I believe will do a fantastic job.
“And I think that Carrie will go down as somebody that Shanna and Keith will be very proud of in the end,” he added.
When contacted by Access Hollywood, the Trump Organization was unaware that Shanna had resigned.
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