Former Miss California Carrie Prejean on Tuesday defended a recently surfaced erotic video of her as a youthful indiscretion and questioned whether it could actually be called a “sex tape” since no one else appears in it.
“It was me by myself. There was no one else with me. I was not having sex,” the controversial beauty queen told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira in New York.
Prejean admitted to making the video of herself and sending it to her boyfriend when she was 17 years old. The tape surfaced during a negotiating session with the Miss California pageant officials over a lawsuit Prejean filed against the organization for stripping her of her crown earlier this year. When the tape’s existence was revealed, Prejean dropped her suit and settled with the officials, who reportedly paid her $100,000 to go toward her legal expenses.
‘Nothing is private’
“You can call it whatever you want to call it. If you want to call it a sex tape, that’s fine,” Prejean told Vieira. “I sent it to my boyfriend at the time. I was a teenager. I cared about him. I trusted him,” she added. “I think now they call it ‘sexting.’
“Did I think it would come back now and haunt me? No. But I think that a lot of young people can learn from this. Nothing is private anymore. Nothing is private.”
Prejean, dressed in a deep blue blouse, black skirt and spike heels and wearing a small silver cross around her neck, also said that pageant owner Donald Trump conducted a sort of private pageant with contestants, hand-picking the best-looking women to go into the finals, even before the judges made their decisions.
Prejean admitted that making the video of herself and sending it — an act that other teens have been prosecuted as sex offenders for doing — was a bad decision.
“It was the biggest mistake of my life,” she told Vieira.
‘Campaign against me’
Prejean was on TODAY to talk about her just-published book, “Still Standing: The Untold Story of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate and Political Attacks.” And even before admitting that making the video was a mistake, she accused her enemies of using it to attempt to silence her.
“The main point is there has been a campaign against me to try to silence me for the past seven months for the answer that I gave at the pageant,” she said.
She was referring to April 19 and the finals of the Miss USA pageant, when celebrity blogger Perez Hilton asked her opinion of same-sex marriage. Prejean cited her Christian beliefs in saying she believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Hilton responded later by calling her a “dumb b---h.”