Carrie Prejean sues pageant organisers for religious discrimination

Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California who was stripped of her title after she spoke out against gay marriage during the Miss USA pageant, is to sue the organisers of the state competition for libel, slander and religious discrimination. She has filed a lawsuit against Keith Lewis and Shanna Moakler, co-directors of Miss California, stating that "her title was taken from her solely because of her support of traditional marriage," her lawyer Charles LiMandri said yesterday.

Prejean (above, with Donald Trump) became the poster girl of the American right in April this year after she told Miss USA pageant judge Perez Hilton that she believed that “a marriage should be between a man and a woman" when quizzed about gay unions. The subsequent uproar over her comments on such a key issue of America's culture wars saw Prejean immediately lose her chance of winning the national contest, and subsequently have her state crown taken off her.

Along the way Prejean was feted across the conservative media. On Sean Hannity's Fox News show, the host gushed: "There's a lot of people cheering you tonight that you stood on your principles, that you put principles above winning. Not enough people do that. And I admire you a lot for it." But the right began to turn against when the emergence of a series of semi-nude modelling photos tarnished her goody-two-shoes image.

"I am not perfect, and I will never claim to be... I am a Christian, and I am a model," she said at the time. "Models pose for pictures, including lingerie and swimwear photos." But the photographs seemed to put her in breach of a contract signed with the Miss California pageant organisers: a clause required contestants to reveal whether they had ever posed nude or semi-nude, and the 21-year-old answered in the negative. On June 10, she was eventually stripped of the Miss California title.

Her lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles on Monday, claims that Moakler, Lewis and pageant PR man Roger Neal directed a "conspiracy" against her, making "false and defamatory statements... in order to injure her reputation and to justify their plan to wrongfully revoke her title." She also claims religious discrimination, saying that Moakler had informed her "that she simply had to stop mentioning God at all... despite [their] knowledge of her deeply held religious beliefs as a Christian and her status as a student at a Christian college." ·