Dethroned Beauty Queen Says She Was Targeted As Conservative Christian

A former Miss North Carolina beauty queen is suing the Miss USA Pageant for defamation after she was stripped of her title over old social media posts.

Brittany Boltinhouse said the organization targeted her unfairly because she is a Trump-supporting conservative Christian. 

The lawsuit does not claim that Miss USA doesn’t have the right to take away her crown. Instead, Boltinhouse is accusing the organization of “maliciously coordinating to publish a false public narrative portraying Brittany Boltinhouse as a racist, homophobe, transphobe, and intolerable bigot to be shunned from public life.”

The beauty pageant contestant is suing for loss of income, reputational harm, and emotional distress. 

“Brittany Boltinhouse was not merely stripped of a title. 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,” Boltinhouse’s attorney Patrick M. Mincey said in a statement obtained by People.

Another attorney for Boltinhouse added, “While defendants enjoy a certain level of discretion to crown and remove titleholders, they cannot remove a titleholder for political reasons and then defame that titleholder to the public to hide their true motivations.”

The beauty pageant contestant’s title was stripped after old social posts from 2017 and 2019 resurfaced. The posts included racial slurs, which Boltinhouse has since apologized for. Her attorneys describe the posts as “the self-evident, colloquial use of the popular slang term.”

The lawsuit also states that other social posts “revealed she was a staunch supporter of President Trump, the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and an open skeptic of President Biden’s ‘Transgender Day of Visibility.’”

“Defendants hid from the public the real reason they dethroned Brittany: she is a conservative Christian,” the lawsuit states.

The Miss USA organization announced that Boltinhouse was being stripped of her Miss North Carolina USA 2026 title in an Instagram statement shared on August 5.

Thom Brodeur, chairman and CEO of Miss USA and Miss Teen USA, said in a statement the decision was made due to “conduct over an extended period of time.” Brodeur did not specify the conduct, but did state that the organization “does not tolerate racism, homophobia, transphobia nor language that strips any person of their dignity.”

“I believe I was stripped of my title because of my political stance and my belief system as a conservative Christian woman,” Boltinhouse said in an August 7 interview with the Carolina Journal.