This year’s Miss Universe debacle shows how beauty pageants turned ugly

By Oscar Holland, CNN

(CNN) — Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And for the scandal-ridden Miss Universe pageant, this is proving a big part of the problem.

Opaque and subjective voting criteria have made it difficult to untangle the web of allegations surrounding this year’s finale. The question of whether Miss Mexico, Fátima Bosch, should have won is no longer about how she performed on stage — it’s about allegations of vote-rigging, secrecy and favoritism.

One of the contest judges, Omar Harfouch, has made a plethora of damaging claims on social media since resigning from his post days before last Friday’s finale.

Among them, the Lebanese-French composer claimed 30 finalists were preselected in a “secret vote” by an “impromptu jury” comprising of individuals not on the official judging panel (an allegation the Miss Universe Organization denied). Perhaps more controversially, he said that Bosch’s victory was also pre-scripted, influenced by business ties between the pageant’s co-owner and president of the Miss Universe Organization, Raúl Rocha Cantú, and the Mexican beauty queen’s father.

Neither the Miss Universe Organization nor Rocha Cantú’s lawyer responded to CNN’s requests for comment. On the latter claim, Rocha Cantú told Mexican journalist Adela Micha that a contract his company held with Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex, to whom Bosch’s father is an advisor, was awarded via a fair public bidding process that predates his co-ownership of the Miss Universe pageant. Pemex said in a statement on X that it had a temporary contract with companies linked to Rocha Cantú in 2023, although it emphasized that the relationship no longer exists.

Off-stage drama further engulfed the pageant on Wednesday when Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office announced that Rocha Cantú is being investigated for alleged connections to an organized crime network engaged in drug trafficking, arms trafficking and fuel theft. Rocha Cantú’s lawyer did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment on those allegations, either.

The pageant boss has, however, posted several statements and videos to social media in recent days condemning the other claims. In a defiant three-part Instagram post Rocha Cantú denied Harfouch’s allegations, calling him an “opportunist” exploiting the claims to “gain followers.”

The fallout has been disastrous for the pageant’s organizers. Ivory Coast delegate and fourth runner-up, Olivia Yacé, who many viewers felt should have won the crown (and who Harfouch said was excluded from contention “solely because she might face visa issues”), has since renounced her Miss Universe Africa and Oceania title, saying in a carefully-worded statement that she wanted to “remain true” to her values.

Shortly after, Rocha Cantú appeared to concede that the strength of competitors’ passports was among “many things to take into consideration.” Discussing Yacé’s Ivorian citizenship, in his interview with Micha, he added: “She’s going to be the Miss Universe who spent a whole year in an apartment because of the cost of the visa process with lawyers. Some of them require six months’ notice. The year’s already gone, right?”

And even prior to the finale, the pageant had been beset with controversy. Earlier in the month, a Thai pageant director berated Bosch during a pre-pageant meeting, triggering a mass walkout of contestants.

Reputation for scandal

Often sitting at the intersection of politics and national pride, pageants have proven to be magnets for scandal. This year’s debacle is just the latest facing Miss Universe, its competitors and its global franchises, the network of national contests that select each country’s representative.

In the last five years alone, local organizers have faced allegations of discriminatory entry requirements (France), sexual harassment (Indonesia) and xenophobia (South Africa). At Miss USA, meanwhile, 2023 winner Noelia Voigt resigned her post via a cryptic mental health-related social media post seemingly containing the message “I am silenced,” spelled out with the first letters of the opening 11 sentences, sparking rumors of a strict non-disclosure agreement. Days later Miss Teen USA forfeited her title, too.

The kind of controversies surrounding 2025’s Miss Universe are “not at all new” in pageantry, said Hilary Levey Friedman, a sociologist and author of “Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America.”

“People have long said, ‘Oh my gosh, it was fixed,’ or ‘They knew someone,’ or ‘There’s this conflict of interest,’” she said, adding that business interests are, also, nothing new. “These pageants have really always had a strong commercial past, and always had a tradition of men owning them and women competing.”

Miss Universe, which was co-owned by Donald Trump from 1996 to 2015 is, above all, a business. Organizers may arguably have a moral obligation to fairness, and a duty of care to contestants, but the competition’s integrity is, primarily, a matter of reputation. “It is not a public institution,” Rocha Cantú reminded his critics on Instagram earlier this week. “We do not receive public funds or sponsorships from any public entity.”

Struggle for relevance

In recent years, the column inches dedicated to pageant controversies have seemingly outweighed interest in the contests themselves. This raises the inevitable question: does anybody really care?

Miss Universe may be known as the “Super Bowl” of pageants, but this year’s finale was not even broadcast on English-language television in the US. (It was only available there via streaming, although Telemundo carried live coverage in Spanish.) “That is just such a wildly enormous difference from 20 years ago, let alone 50 years ago,” said Friedman, adding: “Viewership is so down, but press coverage of the scandals is so high. It’s just fascinating.”

Widely criticized by feminists, and others, for promoting singular beauty standards and archaic notions of womanhood, the contests’ decline points to wider societal shifts. Whether beauty pageants — events that, almost by definition, objectify women — should have any role in today’s world is a matter of debate. But even those who support their ongoing presence might struggle to argue that aspects of the contests are not hopelessly outdated.

Recent changes to Miss Universe’s rules, while billed as modernizing, lag decades behind the times. New regulations finally allowing over-28s, mothers and married women to participate — a concession made, astonishingly, in this decade — were hardly revolutionary. The pageant’s swimsuit (read: bikini) contest meanwhile endures, years after competitions like Miss World and Miss America ditched theirs in favor of marginally more demure alternatives, such as athleisure parades.

But Friedman pointed to a fundamental clash between attempts to modernize and the “glitz and glamour” the events rely on to attract audiences. “They’ve tried to become more academic, more focused on ‘platform’ issues like social service, that sort of thing,” she said. “But that’s not super exciting to watch, right?”

“I just think there’s so many different opportunities for women these days,” said Friedman, who is also the daughter of Miss America 1970, the late Pamela Eldred. “In the past, when they were so popular, it was partially because women just didn’t have as many outlets to pursue their ambition, to pursue career paths and that sort of thing. And so, I guess on some level, you could say pageants are a victim of their own success.”

Too little, too late

For Miss Universe, an immediate balm might be the introduction of clearer voting criteria and auditing processes. The pageant’s organizers had previously asked accounting firm Ernst & Young to oversee voting, though it is unclear whether this year’s contest was audited (or if so, by whom). Critics quickly pointed out that the results were read from a simple piece of paper rather than removed from a sealed envelope, as was once the norm. The Miss Universe Organization did not respond to CNN’s request for clarity on the matter.

It may simply be too late for big pageants to reform their way back to mainstream cultural relevance. But dismissing their future entirely ignores the high esteem in which they are held in many countries outside the West — in the Philippines, for instance, where pageantry has a near-national-sport status.

Supporters also point out that many beauty queens use their platforms to advocate and fundraise for charitable causes; some have used pageants to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. This year’s Miss Philippines Ahtisa Manalo, for instance, says she paid college fees though a combination of scholarships and pageant prize money.

Let us not forget, too, that it is often the women themselves, not organizers, who suffer during these scandals. Earlier this week, Bosch posted screenshots of the litany of abusive messages sent to her by social media users unhappy with last Friday’s result. “In recent days, I have received insults, attacks and even death threats for one reason only: because I won,” she wrote on Instagram.

But Bosch’s ability to speak out exemplifies one way in which pageantry is, Friedman said, changing for the better. If social media is increasingly the source of controversy for franchise owners, it has simultaneously empowered contestants by expanding their platforms and allowing them to raise concerns publicly.

“I think what’s different is that people now have a way to get their message out in a way they didn’t before,” Friedman said, adding: “The #MeToo movement and centering of women’s narratives has led to women having more of a public voice. And ironically, or not, that has happened in pageantry as well.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

Rocío Muñoz-Ledo, Lizbeth Padilla and Kocha Olarn contributed to this story.