What Really Happened Inside Miss USA?

Accusations of racism, sexual harassment and rigging have plagued the organization in recent years, but no reigning titleholder has ever quit. Then Miss USA and Miss Teen USA resigned in the same week.

Laylah Rose says she won her first pageant at the age of 2. With dark, glossy hair and a measured smile, she went on to enter many more. Yet, even as a girl, she dreamed of something bigger. Ms. Rose didn’t only want to wear a sash, as her mother and grandmother had done before her: She wanted to run Miss USA.

Last summer Ms. Rose, 45, whose legal name is Laylah Loiczly, finally achieved that goal. In an email, she said she saw “opportunities to improve, enhance and in many ways repair the iconic brand.”

Those repairs were sorely needed. In recent years, Miss USA has weathered allegations of racism and sexual harassment, and has passed from owner to owner — one of them being Donald J. Trump. The 2022 suicide of Miss USA 2019 sent the organization reeling. In 2023, Ms. Rose’s predecessor was suspended after accusations of pageant rigging.

In her first months in charge of the pageant, Ms. Rose got to work. (She bought the rights to manage Miss USA for an initial payment of $1.5 million, according to a preliminary deal document.) She helped secure a multiyear deal with the CW to broadcast the Miss USA pageant for the first time since 2016. In an interview, Renato Basile, a Hollywood producer she hired to work on the production, credited her with “bringing the luster back to Miss USA and Miss Teen.”

But less than a year into Ms. Rose’s tenure as the president and chief executive of the organization, the reigning Miss USA and Miss Teen USA, Noelia Voigt and UmaSofia Srivastava, stepped down within days of each other. In the pageant’s seven-decade history, no winner had ever quit.