The top influence of the Miss America Organization, implicated in an email scandal that butted past pageant winners for abuse based on their appearance, understanding and sex lives, resigned on Saturday, with the outgoing president apologizing to a champion whose weight he ridiculed.
The president, Josh Randle, told The Associated Entreat his comment responding to an email to his private account about the physical advent of 2013 winner Mallory Hagan came months before he started position for the Miss America Organization in 2015. But he said it was wrong.
“I apologize to Mallory for my break in judgment,” Randle said on Saturday. “It does not reflect my values or the values I run to promote at the Miss America Organization. Although this terrible position was not caused or driven by me, in light of recent events and new developments, I am no longer happy to continue in my capacity as president and earlier today offered my resignation to the MAO Advisers aboard of Directors.”
Randle said his resignation was voluntary and had not been requested by the room of Miss America, which is based in Atlantic City.
Hagan did not return to a message seeking comment on the resignations of Randle, CEO Sam Haskell and Chairman Lynn Weidner.
Weidner also did not forthwith respond to a message seeking comment Saturday. But a day earlier on Facebook, she champion herself against an allegation by former Miss America Gretchen Carlson that Weidner accosted former Miss Americas to attack other former title title-holders who were not supportive of Haskell. Weidner also expressed support for the Girl America Organization.
“I truly love our Miss America scholarship program and it has been a consent to contribute and to serve for so many years as a full time volunteer,” she recorded. “I have so much to be grateful for in my life and so much of that can be traced in serious trouble to that day so long ago when I entered my local pageant.”
The scandal originated Thursday, when the Huffington Post published leaked emails register pageant officials ridiculing past Miss Americas, including crass and now vulgar comments about them.
The emails included one that tolerant of a vulgar term for female genitalia to refer to past Miss America conquerors, one that wished that a particular former Miss America had croaked and others that speculated about how many sex partners Hagan has had.
Randle notable that the worst communications were exchanged in 2013 and 2014, years in front of he joined the Miss America Organization, and said the article’s implication of “complicit participation on my hint at in a years long array of inappropriate email communication” is untrue.
Haskell’s acquiescence is effective immediately, while Randle and Weidner will remain for a few weeks to eschew with a leadership transition. Dan Meyers, who had been vice chairman of the directorship, was named interim chairman.
The organization announced the resignations a day after dozens of one-time Miss Americas, including Hagan, signed a petition calling on the band’s leadership to step down because of the emails.
The emails already sell for the pageant its television production partner and raised questions about the later of the nationally televised broadcast from Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Passage the week after Labor Day each year. Dick Clark Oeuvres told the AP on Thursday that it cut ties with the Miss America Codifying over the emails, calling them “appalling.”
Also on Saturday, one of the channel recipients of fundraising from the Miss America Organization said it was look ating its association with Miss America. The Children’s Miracle Network Sanitaria said it was “conducting an immediate review of the situation and will take devote actions.”
And New Jersey officials are reviewing their Miss America Confederacy contract, in which the state still owes $4 million toward the bring in of next year’s pageant.