If you’re into UFOs and aliens, the last five years or so have been fantastic.

There’s been a big shift in the public discourse around UFOs and alien life, thanks in large part to a 2019 story published in the New York Times about reports of UFOs — also known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) — off the East Coast a decade ago. Since then, the whole topic of UFOs feels considerably less fringe than it once did.

We still don’t have anything like evidence of actual aliens, but it is, at least, a live question in a way it wasn’t before. I’m still inclined to believe that there are far more plausible explanations for UAPs that don’t involve extraterrestrial creatures. The possibility, however, that aliens might exist raises all sorts of fascinating questions.

How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life change our world and our understanding of our place in it? And what if aliens are real but so unlike anything we can imagine that we can’t even begin to understand the implications?

Diana Pasulka is a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and the author of two books on this topic. Her first book, American Cosmic, was focused on the religious dimensions of UFO mythology. The new one is called Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, and it dives into the experiences of people who claim to have encountered alien life.

I recently invited Pasulka to The Gray Area to talk about her research, the stories she’s heard from people who claim to have experienced UFOs, and how her views have evolved in surprising directions. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

When you write in this book that UFO events are a “spiritual reality” for people, what does that mean?

Diana Pasulka

UFO events are transformative realities for the people who experience them. They’re not necessarily good — religious events are sometimes bad and sometimes good. I heard people talk about their experiences with UFOs and sometimes with what they called “beings associated with UFOs” and it sounded very similar to what I had been reading about in the Catholic historical record.

I was finishing a book about the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and I noticed that there were a lot of aerial events in the Catholic tradition, the historical record. There were no planes, there were no rockets back then. People were seeing things in the sky and they were interpreting them in various ways, one of which was these could be souls from purgatory or they could be houses of saints and things like that. I think we’re dealing with something here that isn’t necessarily a new religion so much as a new form of spirituality.

Sean Illing

So when people tell you that they’ve encountered aliens or they’ve been visited by angels, you really believe them?

Diana Pasulka

I believe that they believe it, but that doesn’t commit me to the belief that it happened. I’ll give you an example. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a very famous mathematician in the early 20th century from India, and he was a genius. And he believed these math calculations were whispered in his ear by his goddess, the goddess of his local region. I think she was a version of Lakshmi. So that’s a story that takes hold and gets repeated.

Now, am I committed to the belief that Lakshmi gave Ramanujan that? No, I’m not. But I can definitely study that process, and I can study it in people today who say that they are experiencing aliens who are giving them this type of creative impulse, and I can leave aside the question of the objective existence of these entities.

Sean Illing

What’s the most “holy shit” thing you’ve seen or heard after 14 years of researching this?

Diana Pasulka

I would say it would be the experience of a pilot who had a sighting while he was flying and then saw something that appeared to be like a human face. And then he started to see this person in crowds. He would also see UFOs in daylight, but he wouldn’t tell anybody because he noticed that other people didn’t see them.

And he also had burns. His eyes started to hurt. I asked a scientist about that and said, “What’s this effect?” And he said, “It was the effect of some type of radiation on his retinas.” So that was pretty weird!

Sean Illing

I just don’t know what to do with some of these stories and characters you profile in the book. The vividness of the accounts, the consistencies, the depth — it is puzzling, to say the least. It’s hard to believe there’s nothing to see here.

Diana Pasulka

Well, I agree with you. I mean, I started out as a complete nonbeliever. But when I met people who were in the space program or top researchers, one at Stanford, and there were so many of them, I was absolutely shocked. And that shock lasted for a couple of years.

I’ve been studying this now for about 14 years, so that’s a long time. I actually believe these people. It’s definitely changed the way I look at the historical religions as well as what people are talking about today. We can only say that these people are having these experiences. Most of them will not come out and say that because of their jobs. There’s still a stigma and I don’t blame these people for not coming out publicly. I’m just not going to disbelieve them because I’ve met thousands of people who are credible witnesses, and the patterns are so similar.

Sean Illing

The skeptic in me says the will to believe is so strong in the human mind and we can sincerely convince ourselves of almost anything. I believe that the people you write about in the book believe the things they’re telling you to be true.

But as you were saying, that doesn’t mean they’re true or it doesn’t mean that they’re reliably true. So to take one random example, there’s that guy you talked to who moved his family out of Los Angeles to live in some remote town because he got a message from Jupiter telling him to do so. That just sounds like the hallucinations of a confused person.

Diana Pasulka

I mean, what did the pilgrims do? Or what did people who had visions and thought that they needed to leave Egypt or go someplace because a god told them to? Or because they had a vision from an angel that told them to do this? This is how I see that type of thing. I see it as a continuation of a process that humans have experienced for thousands of years. It’s a fundamental religious impulse. That’s how I see it.

Sean Illing

A religious impulse, sure, but that’s separate from the question of truthfulness. And again, I may sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m just being honest about my own ambivalence. Despite what I just said about the will to believe being strong, I also think the will to hold on to our current worldview is strong because letting go of that means letting go of almost everything we take to be true — and that’s scary.

So there are forces pushing in both directions here. For me, the only sensible position at this point is agnosticism. I’m open to the evidence, but there’s not enough yet.

Diana Pasulka

Yeah, I do think that. I also want to push back a little on what you said about the will to believe. It seems like most people don’t want to experience these things. That pilot didn’t want to experience that. He didn’t want to believe it. He was just going about his life, doing fine, and then everything gets turned upside down. He sees this face in the clouds and it’s almost mocking him. Who would want to experience that?

This is also the case with people who claim to have seen angels or souls from purgatory in the 1600s or 1700s. They weren’t actually looking for that.

I put one of those experiences in my book about purgatory, and it was this nun who saw an orb and it would come into her cell in the convent and she was terrified. And she told people in the convent, nobody believed her, but she kept to her story and finally Mother Teresa sat up with her and sure enough she saw the same thing. And so, they then interpreted that orb as a soul from purgatory and the whole convent prayed for weeks to get rid of it, and it finally disappeared.

Sean Illing

To get back to this broader question about the possibility of alien life, I’m not even going to ask if this discovery would be the most significant event in human history, because it obviously would be. But I do wonder what you think the most significant implication of that discovery would be for us as a species?

Diana Pasulka

For a person who has studied the historical religions, I would say that most people in the world believe in nonhuman intelligence because most people are religious. And so within various different religions, you have different forms of nonhuman intelligences that display themselves in different ways to people. It’s mostly people in the post-Enlightenment West who are disbelievers in that narrative. So it would absolutely be the most shocking event for us, and the implication would be something like a post-secular society.

Sean Illing

I’m not sure we’re nearly as secular as we think, but that’s another conversation. I guess I’d say this: What made the Copernican Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution so significant, not just scientifically but culturally, is that they decentered humanity. The claim to being a special animal with some unique significance fell apart. It turns out we’re part of the same historical process as everything else.

But the discovery of alien life, if it were to happen in a way that would be impossible to deny, that would be the final step in the revolution opened up by Copernicus and Darwin. It would, in a terminal way, upend our sense of our own creaturely significance, which I think is a beautiful thing in some ways. But if the price of that discovery ends up being aliens showing up and destroying us, it’s totally not worth it.

Diana Pasulka

Yeah, that would be bad!

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you’ve spent enough time scrolling through TikTok, you might have seen a video from an account like @tybuggyreviews, a handle with half a million followers that exclusively posts videos selling products through the TikTok Shop.

The creator, whose verified Instagram account identifies him as Tarik Garrett, used the @tybuggyreviews account to pitch viewers on supplements, water flossers, earbuds, workout machines, bible study guides, probiotics for women to help “that smell down there,” watch bands, inspirational hoodies, inspirational T-shirts, face massagers, foot massagers, rhinestone necklaces, oil pulling kits, and colon cleanses.

In the TikTok Shop, creators earn a commission for each sale linked to their account. Garrett’s product videos got tens of thousands of views. A few even topped a million views. But nothing from his account took off quite like his sales pitch for an obscure 2019 publication called The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies.

“Now I see why they’re trying to remove TikTok. This book right here? This book of herbal remedies? They do not want us to see this book,” Garrett said at the beginning of one Shop video, referring to a new US law that requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company to either sell the app or face a ban. TikTok is challenging the law in court, arguing that lawmakers citing national security concerns as a reason to pass the bill did not adequately argue why those concerns should supersede the First Amendment. The law, to be clear, does not cite the Lost Book of Herbal Remedies’s availability on the TikTok Shop as a reason for banning the platform.

Garrett posted his pitch for the book on April 15. As of May 7, the video had more than 16 million views. Garrett opened the book and showed pages of its recommendations, urging users to take screenshots (and purchase a copy of their own) before it’s too late.

The camera lingered on a list of plants that, the book claimed, were treatments for cancer, drug addiction, heart attacks, and herpes. As of Wednesday, the listing for The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies that Garrett linked to has more than 60,000 sales on the TikTok Shop. To put that number in perspective, appearing on a bestseller list generally requires 5,000–10,000 sales in a week.

And that interest isn’t staying exclusively on TikTok. Google search interest in the book’s title spiked on the same day Garrett posted his video. The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies was, as of Wednesday, May 8, ranked 10 on Amazon’s bestseller list for books, and has appeared toward the top of Amazon’s bestseller rankings for the past three weeks.

I sent a handful of Garrett’s videos advertising the book, along with about a half dozen additional widely viewed videos from other creators promoting The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies, to TikTok for comment. A spokesperson for TikTok said that videos linking to Shop products must abide by both the community guidelines, which ban medical misinformation, and Shop policies, which do not allow misleading content. If a video violates only the Shop policies, they said, they’ll simply remove the link to the Shop but keep the content up. If it violates community guidelines, the video comes down.

The violations were enough for TikTok to remove his product review account. Garrett did not respond to a series of emailed questions.

How e-commerce took over TikTok

TikTok has long been good at guessing what its users might want to see, but less good at monetizing that trick. When the platform launched its Shop feature in the United States last fall, the For You page shifted, pushing video after video like those made by @tybuggyreviews in the hope that its users will start buying the products that go viral on TikTok directly from their store.

The result became a For You page with constant interruptions from random product pitches. Right now, for instance, my For You page shows me a bunch of creators dancing to a German song about rhubarb, a bunch of pet birds behaving poorly, chaotic nonbinary people, and lots of ads from alternative wellness creators trying to sell me oils, mushrooms, and books.

The Shop ads I see, like much of the content pushed to me on TikTok, are personalized, though my TikTok Shop recommendations are heavily influenced by my reporting on stories like this one. Your results may differ. And yet, it is clear that TikTok has catapulted the Remedies book into relevance beyond a niche audience. The company earns money off of the explosion of sales on the shop, some of which come from creators who are explicitly promoting unproven cancer “cures” and conspiracy theories about the platform.

Like the Shadow Work Journal, a workbook that went super viral on TikTok Shop several months ago as a mental health tool — despite its dubious effectiveness — The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies is part of a swell of wellness creators, brands, and products that have found success reaching new audiences on TikTok Shop.

Shop videos have become a sort of “loophole” for health misinformation on TikTok, said Evan Thornburg, a bioethicist who posts on TikTok as @gaygtownbae and studies mis/disinformation and public health. Creators, and those with something to sell, know that Shop videos will get privileged on For You pages. Some creators may use those videos to promote dangerous health claims. In other cases, Thornburg noted, “the creator promoting the material isn’t necessarily spouting off disinformation, but the material that they’re convincing people to purchase is.”

A recipe for misinformation

The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies appears to be a case of both: The book contains misleading information, and creators are circulating misleading health claims in order to sell books. A video with nearly 1 million views promoting the book’s TikTok Shop listing is basically a series of ominous, AI-generated images with an AI voiceover. The video claims that the book contains secrets previously locked away in an ancient book located in the “Vatican library,” and that The Lost Book of Herbal Medicine was previously only available on the “dark web” before surfacing on TikTok. (Not true: The book is for sale on Amazon, the author’s website, and appears to be available through some academic and public library systems.) Another Shop video with more than 1 million views is captioned, “Cure for over 550 diseases, even cancer.”

I scanned through a copy of The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies this week. The 300-page book contains a disclaimer noting that it’s intended to “provide information about natural medicine, cures, and remedies that people have used in the past,” that it is not medical advice, and that some of the “remedies and cures found within do not comply with FDA guidelines.” It’s split into two parts: an alphabetical listing of ailments and conditions alongside the plants that the authors believe can cure or treat them, and an alphabetical list of plants, sorted by region, with instructions on how to prepare them.

The list of ailments the book includes proposed treatments for cancer, several STDs, mental health disorders, and digestive issues, among many other things. A few stand out: The book lists cures for smallpox, strep, and staph infections. There’s an emergency medicine section that includes plant remedies for serious medical conditions like internal bleeding and poisoning.

Flip to the entries for the plants and you’ll find lists of claims referring to research that is not cited. An entry promoting Ashwagandha’s “anti tumor effects” and ability to “kill ... cancerous cells” refers to “research,” but does not note that, while there is some indication that Ashwagandha can slow the growth of cancer cells, these studies were conducted on rodents and have yet to be replicated on humans.

Nicole Apelian, one of the book’s authors, did not reply to an emailed request for comment. While active on TikTok, it’s not her main social media presence. Her TikTok bio encourages her 17,000 followers there to check her out on Instagram, where she has 100,000 followers. Apelain also runs Nicole’s Apothecary, an herbal shop mentioned in the book that sells some of the tinctures she recommends, sells memberships to an online “Academy” for fans of her book, and advertises her paid appearances and workshops.

The endless whack-a-mole

As a journalist, there’s a pattern that becomes evident when writing about health misinformation on social media: something gets views, you assess the real or potential harm and try to understand its context, you contact the company to ask about the harmful thing. Maybe the video or post or group is taken down, maybe it’s not. The company gives you a statement, refers you to their policies on misinformation, and then you publish the article. This happens over and over and over and over because writing about misleading health information is a game of whack-a-mole that feels harder and harder to win.

Thornburg, the bioethicist, noted a couple reasons why I can’t climb out of this purgatory. First, meaningful moderation of a platform like TikTok is somewhat implausible. Social media companies are “never going to prioritize the amount of labor that would need to consistently be put into misinformation management,” they said.

Most sites rely on a combination of human moderators and AI, and it’s difficult to create automated moderation tools that don’t also censor allowed content. For example: health misinformation targeting minority communities often taps into legitimate distrust of medical professionals and institutions that have roots in recent history. An AI tool designed to moderate keywords associated with this sort of targeted misinformation might also sweep up criticism of health care systems in general.

And second, the creators who profit off health misinformation are really good at figuring out what they can say where, and what Thornburg calls “life boating” their audiences from one platform to another as needed. “You will have people who will drive interest in something through TikTok because the virality and the algorithm are aggressive,” Thornburg said. Then, their profile will link out to their Instagram or Linktree or YouTube channel.

Health misinformation on social media is a million cross-pollinating moving targets. TikTok Shop is a hot spot right now. Later, it might be something else on another platform. Chasing this content from platform to platform, harm to harm, viral video to viral video, is exhausting. I am exhausted.

At the end of our interview, Thornburg shared the question that drives a lot of their work in this space, “Who do we consider accountable for these things that are harmful and regulate them or hold them to certain standards?” Often, it’s not really the person behind the individual piece of content driving the incentives for making it.

As a result of my reporting, Garrett’s account was taken down, along with a few other popular videos advertising a book that has already sold tens of thousands of copies. As long as the incentives remain, it won’t be long until the next product promising a miracle starts polluting my For You page.

Over the course of a week, Miss USA Noelia Voigt and Miss Teen USA UmaSofia Srivastava both relinquished their titles, marking an unprecedented period of turbulence in the pageant’s history. Since Miss USA was established in 1952, no title holder has ever before voluntarily stepped down. Now, two of them have resigned, a mere three months before their reigns end. It’s a moment that’s raising major questions about the pageant’s increasingly troubled image.

In her resignation letter, portions of which leaked to the press, 24-year-old Voigt describes a “toxic work environment” within the Miss USA Organization that has badly affected her physical and mental health. She adds that she is now in treatment for anxiety and that she’s experienced “heart palpitations, full body shakes, loss of appetite, unintentional weight loss, loss of sleep, loss of hair, and more.”

Voigt kept things less explicit, however, in her public announcement, which took the form of a cryptic Instagram post published days before. “Deep down I know that this is just the beginning of a new chapter for me, and my hope is that I continue to inspire others to remain steadfast, prioritize your mental health, advocate for yourself and others by using your voice, and never be afraid of what the future holds, even if it feels uncertain,” Voigt wrote.

Seventeen-year-old UmaSofia Srivastava posted her own note to Instagram, saying, “My personal values no longer fully align with the direction of the organization.”

The unsettling implication sent fans scrambling for more information — as did the revelation that Voigt’s post might have contained a secret message. The capital letters of the first 11 sentences in her statement spell out the words “I AM SILENCED,” leading observers to speculate that there’s a lot Voigt would like to say if not for a nondisclosure agreement — including, perhaps, the statements she made in her leaked resignation letter.

“People are under these ironclad NDAs at the moment,” says pageant coach and 2018 Miss Montana USA Dani Walker in a phone call to Vox. Walker, who makes YouTube videos about the internal politics of the pageant world and is friendly with the titleholders, says that she’s been contacted by multiple inside sources who have information she can’t publish online because of those NDAs. “I do, however, know that there are people working in the background trying to find loopholes that are going to allow these people to speak out, to really give everybody the full picture,” she says.

The Miss USA Organization responded to Voigt and Srivastava’s resignations on Instagram by saying that it considered the well-being of its titleholders a “top priority” and that it would be announcing a successor soon but did not answer allegations of a toxic workplace. The organization did not respond to a request for comment from Vox. Meanwhile, many of the state titleholders who competed alongside Voigt in the 2023 Miss USA pageant have released statements of their own standing behind Voigt and calling on the organization to release her from her NDA, “so that she is free to speak on her experiences.”

The Miss USA pageant has been dogged by controversy over the past few years, from the notoriety of former owner Donald Trump to the release of the damning New York Times-produced documentary How to Fix a Pageant last September. For those enmeshed in the pageant world, Voigt’s and Srivastava’s consecutive resignations come as less of a shock and more as confirmation of what they have long suspected: Something is going very wrong inside the Miss USA Organization.

The Miss USA resignations are happening amid toxic workplace allegations

This month’s first resignation from the Miss USA Organization didn’t come from Voigt or Srivastava. It came from social media director Claudia Michelle, who stepped down from her post on May 3. In a candid Instagram post, Michelle made multiple allegations of mistreatment in the workplace. One of them was that unnamed others at the organization used the official social media accounts behind her back, deleting negative comments and blocking critics. That allegation was corroborated by Walker, who was one of the blocked parties, and said in a YouTube video that she spoke with Michelle about it.

Michelle also wrote that Srivastava and her family had been treated with disrespect. “I feel the way current management speaks about their titleholders is unprofessional and inappropriate; I disavow workplace toxicity and bullying of any kind,” Michelle wrote.

The three women all quit within a week of each other: Michelle on Friday, followed by Voigt on Monday and Srivastava on Wednesday. According to the New York Post, they agreed to quit together and coordinated their resignation announcements.

Michelle declined to provide details about the workplace toxicity and bullying she says she witnessed, but many of those affiliated with the Miss USA pageants have publicly speculated about mistreatment by organization president Laylah Rose.

“Laylah Rose leads by fear and has scared or threatened them into silence,” wrote 1994 Miss Oregon USA Denise White in the comments of Voigt’s post, also alleging the use of NDAs.

“When people ask me how we got here, I have no good answer — except that Laylah did say that she wanted to make history,” Walker said on YouTube, in a response to the news of Srivastava’s resignation.

Thom Brodeur, Voigt’s pageant coach, also criticized Rose’s leadership of the Miss USA Organization in a phone call with Vox. “She’s now on her fourth [management] team in a year, and she has an unprecedented two national title holder resignations,” he said. “This never happened in the 72-year history of this organization. They’re both gone. So somewhere, at some point, somebody has to look at the leader and go, ‘Gosh, there’s an awful lot of smoke. How come there’s a fire in your house?’ There’s something going on here that isn’t working, and it can’t be all of those other people.”

Voigt’s resignation letter, obtained by NBC, describes Rose as cold and threatening. In the letter, Voigt says Rose threatened to take away Voigt’s salary for minor issues that were never clearly communicated to her. Voigt alleges that when she was scheduled to throw the opening pitch at a baseball game, Rose said she hoped Voigt would be hit in the face by a ball.

In a statement to NBC, Rose said that “the well-being of all individuals associated with Miss USA is my top priority.”

“All along, my personal goal as the head of this organization has been to inspire women to always create new dreams, have the courage to explore it all, and continue to preserve integrity along the way. I hold myself to these same high standards and I take these allegations seriously,” she said.

Brodeur says that the leaked excerpts from the resignation letter match his understanding of Voigt’s relationship with Rose. He adds that he had the original letter read to him and that the full letter is seven pages long. “The stuff that NBC captured is literally the scratching of the surface,” he says. “It goes deeper and it goes a little darker.”

While Srivastava’s resignation letter has not been made public, evidence suggests she was not spared Rose’s wrath either. According to an anonymous source who spoke to the New York Post, Rose treated Srivastava so badly that Srivastava’s parents refused to let her speak directly to their daughter.

In a series of YouTube videos made before the resignations, Walker also alleges that Rose was forbidden to speak to Srivastava directly. Walker adds that she noticed what appeared to be a bizarre form of revenge from the organization in the aftermath. Its official social media accounts began to post congratulations to the pageant runners-up who outscored the official titleholders in various events during the pageant months earlier.

“It’s a really subtle jab to say, ‘Hey, by the way, yes you won the pageant, but you didn’t win Interview. And you didn’t win Evening Gown,’” said Walker in her video. “These are subtle jabs at these titleholders on a really public platform. It’s inappropriate.”

The Post’s source alleges that the organization heavily policed the behavior of titleholders. “Noelia wakes up every day on pins and needles because of harassing emails [from pageant organizers]: ‘Don’t do this,’ ‘Don’t do that,’ ‘Take that post down,’ ‘Unlike that post.’ ‘You can’t speak to anybody, remember your NDA, you can’t go here unless we confirm,’” the source said. The source also alleged that Rose posted to social media under Voigt’s and Srivastava’s names without their approval.

According to both the New York Post’s source and comments made by Voigt on social media, the organization also failed to provide Voigt with the apartment in Manhattan or Los Angeles that is traditionally a part of Miss USA’s compensation package. Five months into her reign, they arranged for her to live in Florida instead.

Walker notes in her videos that under Rose’s leadership, Miss USA has not been appearing at prestigious events like New York Fashion Week or the Kentucky Derby, as is typical. Instead, she’s been making comparatively small-time appearances for pageant sponsors like Supermodels Unlimited. “She literally went about an entire month without appearances,” Walker said in her video. “I’ve never heard of this happening.”

In a phone call with Vox, Walker explained that access to those kinds of events is one of the major draws of being Miss USA. “Miss America is known primarily for their scholarships,” Walker said. If Miss America is a students competition, Miss USA is a competition for a career woman: “They’re provided salary and access to prestigious events.”

The most damning claims about Rose appear in both the Post’s account and Voigt’s leaked resignation letter. The story goes that when Voigt attended a Christmas parade for the organization last year, she was harassed by a man who was riding in a car with her. When Voigt complained to Rose, according to the resignation letter, Rose responded, “We cannot prevent people saying things to you at public appearances, it is, unfortunately, part of the role you’re in as a public figure.” Two people who Voigt confided in about the incident confirmed the story to Vox.

Rose is a relatively new addition to the Miss USA Organization, joining as president in 2023 after working as a fashion designer. Controversy, however, is not new to Miss USA.

Miss USA’s sleazy history

For many Americans, Miss USA is probably best known for being the beauty pageant Donald Trump used to own (the one that’s not Miss America). Trump’s role in the pageant became part of the news cycle during his 2016 campaign for president, when former contestants alleged that he used to walk backstage to ogle them while they were undressed.

Trump was forced to sell the Miss Universe franchise (Miss USA’s parent organization) due to legal complications after he made a series of racist comments about undocumented immigrants during his first campaign event in 2015. He sold it in 2016 to talent agency WME-IMG, but the new ownership came with its own problems. WME-IMG sold the franchise in 2022 to Thailand-based JKN Global Group, and one year later, JKN filed for bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, in 2022, contestants claimed that then-president Crystle Stewart had rigged the competition for the eventual winner. But the allegations under Stewart’s reign didn’t end there. In a series of TikToks, 2022 Miss Montana USA Heather O’Keefe listed her grievances. She and her fellow contestants were confined to a resort for the week of the competition with barely any access to the outdoors, O’Keefe claimed. The organization forced them to pay for all of their own expenses, including the T-shirts they were required to wear on camera.

In 2023, FX released the New York Times-produced documentary How to Fix a Pageant. The documentary centered on the alleged cheating scandal of 2022, but it also made more explosive claims. Former contestants featured in the documentary claimed Max Sebrechts, at the time vice president of Miss USA and married to Stewart, sexually harassed them. Sebrechts stepped down shortly after the news broke. Stewart also resigned in 2022, and was replaced by Rose.

In our current cultural moment, when beauty pageants are frequently considered passé, the official line from the people who love them is that pageants exist to empower women. “We are more than just a pageant,” says the “about” page on the Miss USA website. “We are a community of empowered women who are committed to making a difference in the world.”

“Pageants are one of the very rare and few places where we teach young women life skills,” says Walker. “Most important is poise, confidence, the ability to interview and speak on stage. Those life skills are very applicable and transferable to many things that you want to do in life outside of pageantry. That is the point. That is why we exist. Sure, the crowns and the sashes, they’re fun. But that’s not the point of what we’re doing here. We’re actually creating a platform that is taking young women to the next level.”

For critics like Walker and Brodeur, empowerment is the sticking point here. “Step down,” says Brodeur, rhetorically addressing Rose, “because you have now shown yourself ill-equipped to run this organization. You are not a woman that empowers other women.”

According to Rose’s critics, the Miss USA Organization has betrayed one of its fundamental promises. Instead of giving young women the confidence to build bigger lives for themselves, the organization has instead asked its young contestants to pour enormous amounts of time and money into perfecting their appearance for a corporate structure that harasses them, exploits them, and then instructs them not to complain.

“Our titleholders work very hard,” says Walker. “They deserve respect and they deserve to feel like they’re working in a safe space and that this title is worth all of that effort.”

Otherwise, who exactly is Miss USA empowering?