Alicia Machado: the Miss Universe winner who was bullied by Donald Trump
Donald Trump owning the Miss Universe Organization should be as absurd and foul a concept as Jeffrey Epstein running the Girl Guides.
Yet, as the world proves to us time and time again, there is no limit to the foulness that the Epstein class is capable of, and as the files are showing the world, Trump running the pageant from 1996 to 2015 isn’t even in the top 50 heinous acts they’re responsible for.
There have been longstanding allegations and controversies surrounding Trump’s management of the organisation, with critics accusing him of running it in ways that blurred ethical lines (putting it lightly). At the time, it was widely reported that Trump viewed the pageant as a significant publicity vehicle, leveraging its profile to bolster his own brand.
He would make sleazy jokes about having the right to sleep with whoever he chose. He would allegedly regularly enter the dressing room of its contestants unannounced to stare at them getting changed. God only knows what else he did, but the things we do know about point to a man who was clearly and evidently abusing his ownership of the pageant for his own satisfaction.
His ownership of the pageant came to an end in 2015 when comments he made about immigrants during his presidential campaign caused NBC to cancel all contracts with him. After buying out their stake in the pageant, he sold the organisation to WME/IMG. Perhaps it’s a sign of how far we’ve come as a society that his comments about immigrants could cause him to lose the pageant, when 20 years ago, he could bully its own winner as much as he wanted and get away with it scot free.
But let’s talk about Alicia Machado and the hell the President of the United States put her through when she was all of 19 years old.
How did Trump hurt Alicia Machado?
Born in Aragua, Venezuela, in 1976, Machado was selected for the 1996 Miss Universe Pageant after being crowned Miss Venezuela the year before.
Machado was a trailblazer in her field in some ways, refusing plastic surgery before taking part in the contest, which was unheard of at the time. Yet beauty standards of all our times take their toll, and Machado went on a crash diet leading up to her appearance at Miss Universe. Winning the title but leaving her anorexic, bulimic and dangerously underweight.
When working through her multiple eating disorders, Machado began to gain a slight amount of weight. This being the mid-1990s, this was completely unacceptable and the organisers of the contest she’d already won let her know this. When she asked for help from the organisers, they organised a training day in the gym for her. Trump invited an audience of 80 journalists to watch her. It turns out that behind the scenes, this was completely in keeping with how he’d been treating her prior to that.
During an interview conducted by Hilary Clinton’s ill-fated presidential campaign in 2016, Machado spoke freely of the abuse she’d suffered at his hands during the tournament. “He was overwhelming. I was very scared of him. He’d yell at me all the time. He’d tell me: ‘You look ugly’ or ‘You look fat'” she said, before his abuse became even more personal. “Sometimes he’d ‘play’ with me and say: ‘Hello, Miss Piggy’, ‘Hello, Miss Housekeeping’.”
30 years later, he’s in his second term as president of the United States. At least, at the time of writing. Fingers crossed, eh?