Miss USA 2014 Nia Sanchez Under Fire for Sexual Assault Response, Claims She Doesn't Live in Nevada
Miss America 2014 Nia Sanchez, of Nevada, is not even a full week into her reign but is facing critics for her comments that female college students should "learn to protect themselves" from sexual assault. Now, claims that Sanchez is not a resident of Nevada and lied in order to represent the state have surfaced and are adding even more tarnish to her sparkling tiara.
"She never actually moved to Nevada," a source told Fox 411 about Sanchez's residency, "but continued to work at Disney and live in California, setting up some minimum paper trail to appear like she was in Nevada and allow her to compete. Shanna Moakler is the Nevada director, and she personally coached Nia on what she needed to do to qualify in Nevada and skirt around the need to be actually from there."
Sanchez has disputed this claim, saying that there is "no truth" to the deception or the claim that Moakler helped her get around barriers.
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"Las Vegas is my home," Sanchez said. "I have a house there with a friend. I actually had an agent that was working with me in Nevada a lot so I figured why not work in that state, and then I looked into the pageant program because I had done pageants before. I really liked the way that it was run, the director that ran it, it seemed like a really healthy, well-run state program."
Sanchez took home the titles of Miss Nevada and Miss USA, but seemingly attracted some critics when she answered a question about how to prevent sexual violence on campus. She said that women should "learn to protect themselves," which set off a firestorm, but Sanchez has defended her comment.
"We have 30 seconds to answer a question," she told HuffPost Live. "I feel like all you can do up on that stage on national television is answer the best you personally know how, so I answered with something that I know. I always believe in women empowerment and women's encouragement and for me, in my life, that's self-defense. Maybe for somebody else it's a Taser or something else, but that's the way I could relate to it personally. Unfortunately, the world we live in is not always as safe as we hope it could be. Just feeling confident to escape a scary situation is on women's side."
