14 DAY TRIAL // Carrie Prejean, the “biblically correct” beauty queen who made headlines around the world a few months ago for saying on the Miss USA beauty pageant that marriage should be only between a man and a woman, is again talking up a storm with the pageant that launched her. Although it was the Miss California USA organization that paid for her breast implants, Prejean says in her book, “Still Standing,” that the decision to have surgery was not hers.
As Radar Online can also confirm, despite the fact that both Prejean and the beauty pageant have dropped all accusations against each other and the issue of her returning the money she got to get implants has been settled, she is still not happy about the outcome. In her book, the former beauty queen claims the pageant forced her to get implants, sending her the message (in a more or less direct manner) that she wasn’t suitable to become Miss USA if she didn’t undergo surgery.
Pageant director Keith Lewis and Shanna Moakler, the representative for Miss California USA, both pushed Prejean into getting implants, she says. It happened shortly after she won the Miss California title, and she was led to understand that it was either this way or the highway for her. “[Lewis] told me that he had paid for some of the past Miss Californias to have [breast] jobs, and that I should seriously consider having the surgery. He said, ‘I really think you need it’... He told me the pageant would pay for it and made it clear it had to happen soon.” Prejean wrote in “Still Standing.”
At the time, she admitted she had thought about getting surgery but was not yet determined the pain was worth it. Because of this, she expressed her “reservations” to the pageant officials, but they were not taken into account when they drew the line. Lewis, on the other hand, has recently said that the pageant neither encouraged nor made a habit of paying for implants, and that hers was an isolated case they decided to make an exception of.
“We put to her a litany of questions about how she feels about herself, what she feels she needs to work on, what she may need to change, what is good, what is not good.” Lewis said by means of a response to Prejean’s allegations. To this, she replied that, “Actually, the only thing Keith Lewis put to me were his two big hands and an insistent request, bordering on a demand, that I get breast implants.”