In one of the most explosive controversies to ever hit the Miss America pageant, Vanessa Williams was forced to forfeit her crown after winning the pageant in 1983, when nude photos she posed for at age 19 for Penthouse became public.
In July 1984, Williams discovered that Penthouse planned to publish photos she took two years earlier while working as a photographer's assistant. Williams told People at the time that the photographer assured her the images, some of which involved "two models pos[ing] nude for silhouettes ... to make different shapes and forms," would never be published. Two years later, following Williams' rise to fame, Penthouse paid the photographer the highest fee in the magazine's history for the images and ran them. Williams later told ABC News that pageant officials gave her 72 hours to resign, after which they would rescind her title.
"It was two drastically different images. ... That was the issue," Williams told ABC News about the controversy. "It was Miss America who's really kind of untouched in that reality. And then there was this woman in a picture, (exactly) the polar opposite of purity ... and I was a normal kid in the middle." Following her resignation, "People would ride by the house and beep things and yell stuff," Williams said. "They took down the sign in (her hometown of) Millwood, New York; "Home of Miss America.'"
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