On Thursday, the Huffington Post published emails allegedly sent between Miss America Organization CEO Sam Haskell and various board members in which winners were slut-shamed, fat-shamed and called crude names.
The Miss America Organization did not immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment.
HuffPo reporter Yashar Ali obtained a three years' worth of internal emails that he says contained references to contestants' weight gain and jokes about the women's sex lives.
Reaction was swift. The Associated Press reports that Dick Clark Productions, producer of the live telecast, has cut ties with the Miss America Organization because of the offensive correspondence.
The board also trashed former contestants. In 2014, board member Tammy Haddad allegedly referred to some former Miss Americas as a “pile of malcontents and has beens who blame the program for not getting them where they think they can go.”
Internal emails show particularly vulgar language directed at 2013 winner Mallory Hagan.
In August 2014, Haskell received an email that said Hagan’s hairdresser had been commenting on Hagan’s sex life, as well as her recent weight gain.
Haskell forwarded the email to Miss America telecast lead writer Lewis Friedman and noted, “Not a single day passes that I am not told some horrible story about Mallory.”
Friedman replied, “Mallory’s preparing for her new career … as a blimp in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. As she continues to destroy her own credibility, her voice will attract less and less notice while she continues her descent to an unhappy pathetic footnote.”
Friedman ended the email with, “Ps. Are we four the only ones not to have (slept with) Mallory?”
Haskell replied, “It appears we are the only ones!”
At the end of December 2015, emails suggest Haskell felt Hagan was personally maligning him. The Huffington Post reports that Hagan was informally banned from coaching future Miss America contestants and "soon after, Hagan’s lucrative coaching business fell apart."
There was also disdain for TV commentator Gretchen Carlson, who won the Miss America title in 1989 and was on the organization’s board of directors for many years. The root cause, according to HuffPo, was Carlson’s push to modernize the organization and her refusal to attack former Miss Americas.
When Carlson declined to speak out against former Miss America Kate Shindle (who had questioned Haskell's steep pay in her memoir), Haddad allegedly called the anchor a "snake" in an email to Haskell, adding, "but now u have not (sic) doubts as to her loyalty."
After the HuffPo story broke, Carlson tweeted that she was "shocked and deeply saddened by the disgusting statements about women attributed to the leadership of the MAO. No woman should be demeaned with such vulgar slurs."
Carlson added the hashtag: #ResignNow.