Vanessa Williams doesn’t know how she survived the whole “hullabaloo” of her nude photo scandal. “There was a tremendous amount of onus, pressure, shame, judgment,” she recalled to People magazine in a video profile Wednesday. “I took all that on as a 21 year old.
It was global. You can fail quietly, but that was a worldwide fail.” The “Save the Best for Last” singer made history as the first Black woman to be crowned Miss America in 1983.
Then, 10 months into her reign, Puritanical nonsense temporarily derailed her career. On July 13, 1984, she was stunned to learn — in the middle of an interview — that Penthouse magazine was going to release nude photos of her . Williams said her knee-jerk reaction was to call her parents.
“I talked to my parents, and I talked to my attorney,” Williams said. “That’s when we started to strategize what’s going on ..
.because I hadn’t signed a release.” The “Ugly Betty” alum told reporters at the time that she had posed for the photos two years prior — and as a teenager — while working as a photographer’s assistant.
Williams said the photographer told her that the photos would just be silhouettes, that she’d be unidentifiable, and they would never leave the studio. Despite that information, pageant officials told Williams she had 72 hours to resign or be stripped of her title. She decided to step down, and her nude photos hit shelves.
Penthouse sold nearly 6 million copies of the issue and reportedly earned $14 million, per CBS News . The photographer who sold the photos was paid more than Penthouse had ever paid for a photo spread before, according to Time magazine . It was a business deal that even Hugh Hefner called “immoral” and “improper.
” The Playboy founder told Time that his magazine was offered the nude photos of Williams first, but turned them down. “The single victim in all of this was the young woman herself, whose right to make this decision was taken away from her,” Hefner told the magazine. “If she wanted to make this kind of statement, that would be her business, but the statement wasn’t made by her.
” Most of the public didn’t agree with Hefner, and Williams was disgraced. Although the Miss America beauty pageant publicly apologized to Williams in 2015 for their blunder, the “Desperate Housewives” alum still seems to have regrets about posing nude in the first place. “I look back at my 19- to 20-year-old self and think, ‘Oh, my God you were so naive, so trusting, so vulnerable,’” she told People.
“In your mind [at that age] you think, ‘I’m old, I know what I’m doing.’ I give myself grace now, but as a young adult, I beat myself up, like ‘I should have known better.’” But the Grammy-nominated singer admitted that her adult children have helped her shift her perspective on the whole ordeal.
“[They’re like] ‘Wow, how did you handle all this mom at 20?’” says Williams. “I think it’s only as they’re adults that they realize, ‘Geez, you had to go through a lot.’” Related From Our Partner.
