More like this
Pole-dancing pictures spoil Miss USA’s celebrations
After the Carrie Prejean saga, how will Donald Trump respond to the images of America's first Muslim beauty queen?
Is the Miss USA beauty pageant jinxed? Last year the competition was hit by the Carrie Prejean affair. This year, what looked like a dream PR moment - with the competition being won for the first time by a young American Muslim - has already turned sour with news that Rima Fakih once took part in a pole-dancing contest at a Detroit strip club.
This is the sort of behaviour the organisers of the super-prim competition just don't like to hear about. The question now is whether it broke the strict rules governing the pageant's competitors.
The event that has returned to haunt 24-year-old Fakih happened in 2007 at the Coliseum "gentlemen's club" in America's auto capital. She was photographed sliding up and down a stripper's pole in red hotpants. At one stage, she is seen with dollar bills stuffed in her bra.
The photos were posted on the website of a Detroit radio station, Mojo in the Morning, following Fakih's win at the Planet Hollywood casino in Las Vegas on Sunday.
To be fair to Fakih, the pictures are hardly as raunchy as they sound. She is wearing more clothes than this correspondent has ever seen on a pole-dancer - a sober blue tanktop above her red shorts - and has the look of a girl taking part in a student prank.
But the pictures are enough to put an instant dampener on Sunday's victory, when family and friends of the Lebanese-born girl, who came to America as a baby, gathered to celebrate in her hometown of Dearborn, Michigan.
"This is the real face of Arab Americans, not the stereotypes you hear about,' Zouheir Alawieh, told the Detroit Free Press. "We have culture. We have beauty. We have history, and today we made history... She believed in her dreams."
Donald Trump, who co-owns the pageant along with NBC television, has refused to comment. Last year he initially defended Miss California, Carrie Prejean, when she controversially spoke out against gay marriage during the interview segment of the Miss USA competition.
However, he soon took her away her crown when the Prejean affair snowballed and, by the end, the all-American blonde had to confess to once sending a video of herself taking part in "a solo sex act" to a boyfriend. ·
Comments are now closed on this article
Comments
If the rules are clear and young women enter the competition despite having some small indiscretion recorded somewhere, what's the argument about? Sorry Rima, PR FAIL. Next!
I think this type of issue suffers from a lack of linguistic rigour. When is pole dancing not pole dancing? When the Morris Men are dancing round a Maypole? I guess. So how many clothes do you have to have on/off to qualify, and must it only apply to women, and if so, why is this disgusting sex discrimintation allowed? Is the problem with money...stuffing dollar bills into the clothes? Is it with the titillation? Somebody has to run a 'pole dancing' establishment, but does being in the establishment make it pole dancing? Does being in a hospital make me a doctor? Surely we should forgive and forget if it was a one-off in the younger days of the individual? I don't know - am I the only reasonable person blogging this with the courage to ask basic questions? Well?