
Donald Trump plans to sue the Miss USA contestant who called his Miss Universe
Organization "fraudulent" and "trashy" and said the woman suffers from nothing
more than "loser's remorse."
"She made a very false charge and she knows
it was a false charge," the business magnate said today on "Good Morning America, referring to Miss
Pennsylvania Sheena Monnin. "I think that, frankly, she should apologize but we
will be bringing a lawsuit against her."
Monnin resigned her Miss Pennsylvania title
and quit the Miss Universe Organization this week after charging that Sunday's
Miss USA pageant was rigged.
"Effective immediately I have voluntarily,
completely, and utterly removed myself from the Miss Universe Organization," the 27-year-old beauty queen posted on her Facebook page
Monday. "In good conscience I can no longer be affiliated in any way with an
organization I consider to be fraudulent, lacking in morals, inconsistent, and
in many ways trashy."
Trump said, "It's absolutely ridiculous.
She lost and if you look at her compared to the people who were in the top 15,
you would understand why she's not in the top 15. It's a very, very sad
situation."
Click
here to view a slideshow of the 2012 Miss USA contestants
Monnin said she came to believe that
Sunday's Miss USA pageant was fixed when a fellow contestant said that she'd
learned of the pageant's final top five ahead of the show.
"I witnessed another contestant who said
she saw the list of the Top 5 BEFORE THE SHOW EVER STARTED proceed to call out
in order who the Top 5 were before they were announced on stage," Monnin posted.
"After it was indeed the Top 5 I knew the show must be rigged; I decided at that
moment to distance myself from an organization who did not allow fair play and
whose morals did not match my own."
Trump said the contestant in question, whom he declined to name, denied
Monnin's account.
"My people said that they've already
interviewed that person and that person said it's not true," Trump said on
"GMA."
"Ernst & Young is one of the great,
respected accounting firms. They do the tabulation," Trump said. "It's not like
we care who the final contestants are. You take the 16 and you go down to 10 to
five and then you have a winner and then it's all tabulated. The judges are all
celebrities and they make their pick and that's the end of it."
Pageant officials Tuesday said they received an email from Monnin stating
that she was resigning because of the organization's decision earlier this year
to allow transgendered contestants to enter Miss Universe pageants.
Jenna Talackova, a 23-year-old Canadian beauty queen who had
gender reassignment surgery at 19, was originally disqualified earlier this from
the Miss Universe Canada pageant because she was not a "naturally born female."
After threats of a lawsuit and public outcry, the Trump Organization, which owns
the contest, announced Talackova would be allowed to compete.
The pageant said Monnin, who hails from
Cranberry, Pa., said the following in an email to organizers: "I refuse to be
part of a pageant system that has so far and so completely removed itself from
its foundational principles as to allow and support natural born males to
compete in it. This goes against ever (sic) moral fiber of my being."
Trump said that he believes Monnin's
decision is more about what happened Sunday night than about any policy decision
made by his organization.
"I don't think that she had an issue with
that," he said of the pageant's transgender policy. "I think her primary issue
was that she lost and she's angry about losing and, frankly, in my opinion, I
saw her for barely a second, she didn't deserve to be in the top 15."
Olivia Culpo of Rhode Island was crowned the new Miss USA Sunday night.
Incidentally, she spoke on the topic of the admission of transgender contestants
when answering the pageant's first-ever Twitter-submitted question.
"I do think that that would be fair, but I
can understand that people would be a little apprehensive to take that road
because there is a tradition of natural-born women, but today where there are so
many surgeries and so many people out there who have a need to change for a
happier life, I do accept that because I believe it's a free country," Culpo
said.
Culpo, a 20-year-old cellist, will go on to
represent the United States in the Miss Universe pageant.