Brittany Boltinhouse was crowned Miss North Carolina, then stripped of her title after old posts surfaced showing her repeatedly using the n-word. Now she is doubling down on her right to use the slur. Boltinhouse says she is not sorry and cites the First Amendment’s freedom of speech.
The 27-year-old told the Daily Mail in an August 12 interview: “It felt like I was not able to be an American.” She said that expressing herself is a First Amendment right, and being punished for it left her feeling “ripped” of that right as a “proud American.”
Posts using the racial slur appeared on an account belonging to Boltinhouse from 2017 to 2019. Miss USA Chairman Thom Brodeur said it represented a pattern “over an extended period of time,” and not a one-off mistake, a distinction that factored into her dismissal.
Flipping the Script
But Boltinhouse has flipped the script, claiming she’s being defamed and discriminated against for her “conservative” religious and political views. And now she wants justice.
Her legal team is preparing a lawsuit to challenge the pageant organizers’ decision. They claim to have audio evidence to prove the case.
“I’m going to address those [tweets] in my lawsuit, I’m not going to deny them or run from them. But they did not take my crown because of those posts,” she told the outlet. “[It] was because of my political and religious stance. My rights were violated, and I’m going to stand up for myself. They defined a narrative of me, and I’m here to redefine that now.”
Her attorney, Patrick Mincey, told the outlet he believed the posts were “not racist or evidence of racism.” He pointed to the public smears she’s endured, including being called a racist and a homophobe. He described them as “false slanders and slurs.”
“The recordings are going to show exactly why she was stripped of her crown. It had nothing to do with posts from a decade ago, which we aren’t running from and Brittany isn’t apologizing for,” he said. “The apology is owed to her, and the audio recordings are going to support that.”
Pageant Responds
Pageant organizers, A Blaize Productions, publicly disputed this claim.
“This was not a determination about whether Ms. Boltinhouse was entitled to hold particular political or religious beliefs. She was, and remains, entitled to those beliefs,” they wrote in a statement to the outlet.
The organization said the decision instead came down to “the totality of the circumstances”: previously undisclosed information and other public material involving conduct they found inconsistent with what’s expected of a Miss North Carolina USA titleholder.
The organization crowned runner-up Myla Hadley, who is Black and will represent North Carolina in the national pageant on August 27.
However, Boltinhouse said she doesn’t want her crown back anyway. She told the Daily Mail, “I did [this pageant] for myself, to better myself, grow myself, and to have a platform so I can speak on the advocacies I believe in and stand for as a conservative woman and a Christian woman.”
She added, “I think the eight months of my life spent preparing for that pageant were for something [bigger]. The truth will come out.”
