Orange County Register

Former beauty queen Carrie Prejean says the co-director of the Miss California USA pageant pressured her to get breast implants to improve her chances of winning the national Miss USA title.

The state pageant gave Prejean $5,200 to pay for those implants.

Her account contradicts what pageant organizers have said previously — that Prejean approached them with the request for the implants.

“We would never encourage her to go that route,” Keith Lewis, co-director of Miss California USA, said in May. “We assisted when Carrie came to us and voiced the interest in having the procedure done.”

In Prejean’s newly published book, “Still Standing,” she wrote about a meeting with Lewis shortly after she won last year’s state pageant:

“He told me that he had paid for some of the past Miss Californias to have boob jobs, and that I should seriously consider having the surgery.

“I really think you need it,” he said. “I’ll look up some doctors for you, and we’ll get it going.”

He told me the pageant would pay for it and made it clear it had to happen soon.

In the spring, Shanna Moakler, the other co-director of the state pageant (pictured below with Lewis), said, “It was an option and she wanted it. And we supported that decision. … Breast implants in pageants is not a rarity. It’s definitely not taboo. It’s very common.”

Prejean said she was uncomfortable during the meeting with pageant officials while Lewis appraised her body, which was clad in a “teeny-weeny bikini”:

He touched me on the butt, then ran his hands around my hips, looked at my butt again, touched it again, ran his hands around my hips again, and examined each of my breasts. …

I didn’t believe that Keith, as a gay man, was doing any of this because he was turned on by it. But I do believe he was telling me something. I got the sense that he was saying that because he was the co-director, he could do whatever he wanted with me. …

And then he said, “Have you ever thought of getting a boob job?”

She wrote that she rejected a suggestion that she have Botox injections.

Prejean was ousted as Miss California USA in June when pageant officials said she was not showing up for scheduled appearances. Pageant owner Donald Trump had previously allowed her to keep her state title after old semi-nude photos of her appeared online.

In August, Prejean sued the pageant about the ouster, saying she was targeted because of her opposition to gay marriage. Pageant organizers counter sued, seeking repayment of the $5,200 for her breast implants.

The two sides settled last week, reportedly after the pageant organizers showed her a sex tape she appeared in.

In her book, Prejean describes the circumstances of the semi-nude photos. She said she had agreed to a photo shoot in 2007 wearing a small vest that exposed her nipple when the wind blew.

Later in the book, she included an apology to “young girls who look up to me as a role model…. I acknowledge that I should never have put myself in a position where a photographer could snap inappropriate images of me. … I should have taken a stand.”

Posts about Carrie Prejean:

‘MISS CALIF. PRE/POST-IMPLANTS’ photos

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.