Hard-partying Miss USA may lose her crown
From Sara Hall

NEW YORK—Miss USA could lose her crown this week after news surfaced of the blonde beauty queen’s hard-partying life style, US scandal sheets reported, with none other than flamboyant pageant boss Donald Trump expected to deliver her walking papers.
Eight months into her reign, Tara Conner was to be sent packing because of conduct deemed unbecoming a beauty queen, amid numerous reports — most recently in the New York Post tabloid Monday — of “drinking, drugging and sexual adventures.”
A denizen of the Manhattan’s fast-paced bar scene, Conner, who was crowned Miss USA in April, only reached New York’s legal drinking age on Monday.
But her alleged underage drinking and sexual cavorting with television stars and others from New York’s celebrity “A list” has led pageant owner Trump to read her the riot act.
In a statement released last week, Paula Shugart, president of the Miss Universe Organization, which runs the Miss USA pageant, said a decision about Conner’s “behavioural and personal issues” is imminent.
“The Miss Universe Organization and Mr. Donald J. Trump will be evaluating her behavioural and personal issues to see what we can do to work with her, and what we will do about her reign going forward,” Shugart said.
Every Miss USA must sign a contract about what is expected of her during the year she wears the crown, and pageant officials suggested Conner has fallen far short of the mark.
“Mr. Trump will make a determination and announcement” about her fate, Shugart said. The Post reported that Trump’s verdict could come as early as Tuesday.
Real estate czar and star of the hit reality show “The Apprentice,” Trump ironically is one of New York’s most celebrated party givers and is known to surround himself with his own bevy of pretty women.
The daily wrote that Conner left Manhattan last week to return to her hometown of Russell Springs, Kentucky as the controversy swirled around her.
In addition to a proclivity for life in New York’s very fast lane, Conner reportedly failed to show at appearances scheduled by pageant officials and is alleged to have failed drug test, according to the New York Post.
If she gets the boot, first runner up Miss California USA, Tamiko Nash, will assume the crown and duties of Miss USA for the four months remaining in her reign.
The controversy is the biggest to hit the US beauty pageant world since 1984 when then-Miss America Vanessa Williams was forced to step down two months before the end of her reign, after the publication of nude magazine photographs she’d taken years earlier.