Miss America Winner Cara Mund Slams Pageant Organization Over Workplace Bullying

Miss America Cara Mund has slammed the pageant organization for workplace bullying, making a mockery of the string of announcements made over the last year which had promised to restructure the organization in order to eliminate sexism, according to the New York Post.

Mund, who was crowned Miss America last September, came down heavily on her higher-ups in a letter which was made public Friday.

“About two weeks ago, I started researching workplace bullying… Ultimately, this is my year in a nutshell,” Mund wrote, before blasting Gretchen Carlson, the chairwoman of the Miss America board of directors, and Regina Hopper, who was appointed CEO in April this year in a move which was widely hailed as empowering a competition which had never boasted an all-female leadership since its inception in 1921.

“Our chair and CEO have systematically silenced me, reduced me, marginalized me, and essentially erased me in my role as Miss America in subtle and not-so-subtle ways on a daily basis,” Mund wrote.

Mund accused Carlson and Hopper of not even remembering her proper name, calling her “Kira” on a number of occasions, while constantly undermining her when cameras were present. Not only this, Mund also accused her superiors of retaliation, after the female duo reportedly cut down her appearance time to 30 seconds during a recent event for criticizing their leadership.

This Miss America drama ? “If you want Miss America to be relevant, then the leadership needs to understand she is not a wind-up toy who they can power up to spit out the meaningless words that are put into her mouth" via @amysrosenberg https://t.co/3BrYWWZIvZ

— Julia Terruso (@JuliaTerruso) August 17, 2018

Mund wrote that she wouldn’t even be allowed to dress as she liked during the events, with Hopper barring her from wearing pink because she didn’t like it. On one occasion during a photo shoot, Mund described, Hopper made no effort to hide her distaste of a Karl Lagerfeld dress Mund had been wearing and asked her to “burn” the dress while warning her against wearing it again.

“My tour manager would come into my hotel room and pick out the clothes I was allowed to wear, saying things like, ‘Regina really likes this one,’ or ‘You can’t wear pink. Regina hates pink,'” Mund wrote.

Mund wrote that it was ironic that an organization which had taken so much pain to replace its upper brass with women in an effort to empower women in the wake of MeToo movement was actually sexist. Gretchen Carlson was one of the early and prominent advocates of women fighting workplace harassment when she spoke out and sued her former boss, Roger Ailes of Fox News, in 2016 for sexual harassment. Mund accused Carlson, who is a former Miss America herself having been crowned the winner in 1983, of acting like a diva.

“The rhetoric about empowering women, and openness and transparency, is great; however, the reality is quite different.”

“Right away, new leadership delivered an important message: There will only be one Miss America at a time, and she isn’t me,” Mund wrote.