Dethroned Miss North Carolina sues pageant after being called racist, transphobic

A former Miss North Carolina USA is suing pageant leaders who she says wrongly painted her as racist and transphobic after taking away her crown.

Brittany Boltinhouse filed the defamation lawsuit in Duplin County Superior Court this week.

The 27-year-old won Miss North Carolina USA on June 28. It was her first pageant and she was the first married winner. However, organizers stripped her of the title Aug. 5, less than three weeks before she was set to compete for Miss USA.

The lawsuit doesn’t ask the court to give Boltinhouse her crown back, nor does it challenge the pageant’s power to remove a winner.

Rather, she says pageant leaders defamed her when they told the public why she lost the title. She is also suing over a statement they claimed she had approved.

Miss USA Chairman and CEO Thom Brodeur said the organization “does not tolerate racism, homophobia, transphobia nor language that strips any person of their dignity.”

Brodeur hasn’t publicly named anything Boltinhouse said.

Old social media posts resurfaced shortly after Boltinhouse won the state title. Six posts from 2017 and 2019 showed her using a version of a racial slur as slang. Boltinhouse, who is the child of mixed-race parents, was a teenager when she wrote the posts.

Other posts showed her support for President Donald Trump and conservative activist Charlie Kirk. She attended Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech in Washington but never entered the U.S. Capitol, the complaint says.

In a 2024 post, Boltinhouse criticized former President Joe Biden’s Transgender Day of Visibility proclamation, which fell on Easter. She wrote about her Christian faith and urged Americans to oppose moral decay.

Pageant officials were also unhappy with a post where she praised some things Andrew and Tristan Tate had said. Boltinhouse later said she didn’t know about the controversies surrounding the brothers when she posted it.

The complaint says pageant leaders used those posts to say Boltinhouse hated racial minorities and LGBT people.

“Defendants hid from the public the real reason they dethroned Brittany: she is a conservative Christian,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit includes transcripts of calls that Boltinhouse recorded with state pageant staff.

In those calls, staff members cited her post about Transgender Day of Visibility. They also mentioned her support for Kirk and her attendance at Trump’s Jan. 6 speech.

A Blaize Productions, which runs the North Carolina pageant, also sent Boltinhouse a proposed public apology. It said she took full blame for her old words and actions.

Boltinhouse says she didn’t write or approve it. Yet Brodeur later told the public he had seen the statement publicly posted.

Her lawsuit says this made it look like she had admitted to being racist and anti-LGBT.

A Blaize Productions has denied targeting Boltinhouse for her beliefs.

“We expressly distinguished her personal political and religious beliefs from the conduct and material that were the subject of our concerns,” the company said.

Boltinhouse doesn’t see it that way.

“I believe I was stripped of my title because of my political stance and my belief system as a conservative Christian woman,” she said.

Her lawsuit seeks more than $25,000 in damages for harm to her name, businesses she and her husband run, and career. It also requests punitive damages and a jury trial.

The Miss USA system has let men who identify as women enter its state contests. Heartlander News reported that a transgender-identifying male competed in Miss Maine USA last year.