How did contestants and pageant organizers respond to Trump's comment about entering dressing rooms?
Executive summary
Several former Miss Teen USA contestants said Donald Trump once walked into a dressing room where teenage contestants were changing, prompting shock and quick attempts to cover up, while Trump’s own comments about walking backstage at pageants and his campaign’s denials produced a mix of corroboration, contradiction and fact‑checking about which pageants he meant [1] [2] [3].
1. Contestants’ accounts: panic, quick dressing and memory differences
Multiple contestants from the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant told BuzzFeed and other outlets that Trump entered a changing room while girls as young as 15 were undressing, with at least one, Mariah Billado, describing a scramble to pull on a dress and a sense of alarm at finding a man in the room [4] [1]; BuzzFeed reported nearly half a dozen similar allegations while also noting that many other contestants from that year said they did not recall the episode, creating divergent firsthand recollections from the same event [1] [5].
2. Ivanka’s reported reaction and contestants’ recollection of internal acknowledgement
Billado recalled telling Ivanka Trump about the incident and said Ivanka responded, “Yeah, he does that,” an exchange highlighted in reporting that suggests at least some insiders acknowledged Trump’s backstage behavior at the time, even as contemporaneous memory and subsequent public statements about the episode remain uneven [6] [1].
3. Trump’s own remarks: boasting about backstage access but not always about teens
On Howard Stern in 2005, Trump described going backstage while contestants were getting dressed and said his ownership of the pageants gave him the right to “inspect,” language he framed humorously while admitting he “sort of got away with things like that,” comments that media outlets later connected to contestants’ claims [7] [3] [2]; fact‑checking organizations have pointed out that the Stern comments referred to Miss USA or Miss Universe—pageants with adult contestants—so social posts that explicitly quote him saying “Miss Teen USA” are a distortion of that 2005 remark [7] [5].
4. Organizers and campaign responses: denials, nonresponses and limited official engagement
When the allegations resurfaced in 2016 and in subsequent reporting, Trump’s campaign denied that he ever walked backstage in the way described by some contestants and did not provide documentation to rebut the claims, while other outlets noted a lack of a direct, detailed response from Trump himself to the specific 1997 allegations, leaving official explanation thin and contested [3] [8] [9].
5. How journalists and fact‑checkers framed the dispute: separating quotes, context and pageant types
Independent fact‑checkers and outlets stressed two distinct threads: first, that Trump did boast about walking backstage at pageants in public recordings, and second, that viral posts sometimes misattribute or exaggerate those quotes to imply he admitted to entering Miss Teen USA dressing rooms specifically—an important distinction that does not erase the former contestants’ allegations but complicates the evidentiary picture [2] [7] [5].
6. The broader reaction: credibility battles, memory limits and political framing
Responses to the contestants and to Trump’s comments have split along lines of credibility, with some journalists and outlets treating the multiple contestant statements as corroboration of a pattern and others emphasizing inconsistent recollections and misquoted audio; political actors and social‑media posts have amplified particular readings for partisan ends, meaning public judgment has often reflected agenda‑driven frames as much as the patchwork of eyewitness accounts and archival remarks [9] [5] [8].
Conclusion: contested memories, a clear boast, and unanswered specifics
The record shows Trump publicly boasting about walking backstage at pageants and several former Miss Teen USA contestants alleging he entered a teen dressing room, while campaign denials, many contestants’ lack of recollection, and fact‑checkers’ work distinguishing between Miss Teen USA and adult pageants leave the claim partially corroborated but contested in crucial details—particularly which pageant and the ages involved—so the public response has been a mixture of shock from contestants, denials or limited responses from organizers and the campaign, and sustained scrutiny from journalists and fact‑checkers [2] [1] [3] [7].