Vanessa Williams found fame after winning the 1983 Miss America pageant and becoming the first
Black woman to win the title. However, how she got there and what happened after can certainly
be described as tragic. We'll break it down for you with a deep dive into her tumultuous life.
Vanessa Williams detailed in her 2012 memoir You Have No Idea,
which she co-authored with her mother Helen Williams, how she was molested by
an 18-year-old female family friend when she was 10 years old. She told ABC News:
"It happened one night where she told me, 'Come over here'. I didn't know that it was wrong,
but I knew that it wasn't right because I wasn't supposed to tell anybody."
In 2014, Williams detailed the incident to Oprah's Master Class,
saying she was in fifth grade when the abuse occurred:
"She made you want to feel like you were a grown-up [...] At that young age,
having that happen to you in your body, it awakens your sexuality at an age where it
shouldn't be awakened [...] I think that had that not happened [...] there wouldn't have
been that shame that was always haunting me. It made me more sexually promiscuous."
Vanessa Williams had an abortion when she was a senior in high school,
writing in her memoir that the experience was, quote, "awful, terrifying and plain
sad." She described making an appointment through Planned Parenthood to terminate the pregnancy,
and how years later, she still considered herself pro-choice -- while also identifying as Catholic.
"I'm still pro-choice — every woman should have the right to choose what
she wants to do with her body. I'm still a practicing Catholic. Yes,
I did confess, and I'm grateful for the opportunity of forgiveness."
Williams remembered lying to her mother at the time,
telling her she was rehearsing at school when she was actually undergoing the procedure.
"I never directly told Mom about my abortion, but I had a sense that she somehow knew."
However, in an aside in the memoir You Have No Idea,
Williams' mother confessed that she knew nothing of the procedure at the time.
Williams eventually had four children, and she told ABC News in 2012 that being pregnant is,
quote, "the most frightening thing that happens in your life." At the time of her abortion,
she wasn't mature enough to handle the gravity of motherhood. She said:
"I knew in high school that's something that I was not prepared to do, or fight, or struggle with."
In 1983, Vanessa Williams broke boundaries by becoming the first
Black woman to win the Miss America pageant. She told The New York Times:
"I was chosen because I was qualified for the position."
Furthermore, she observed that the coverage of
her victory was more focused on her race than her talents as a performer.
"The fact that I was black was not a factor.
I've always had to try harder in my life to achieve things, so this is regular.”
As Williams told People in 1989, she began receiving racist blowback
almost immediately after her Miss America win:
"I was getting hate mail from white people who hate black
people and mail from black people who said, 'You're not really black,
because you don't look black' [...] I didn't like having my accomplishments
negated because of the way I looked [...] That was harder to live with than anything else."
The blowback that Vanessa Williams experienced after winning the Miss America pageant in 1983
included terrifying threats against her and her family, with authorities getting
involved to ensure her safety. Speaking to ABC News in 2015, after the Miss America pageant
announced that Williams would return as the pageant's head judge that year,
Williams recalled some of the drastic precautions taken on her behalf:
"There had been death threats against me [...] I had sharpshooters on the top of
the buildings when I had my first parade. In one of the parades down
South [...] usually they have Miss America in a convertible. I had to be inside."
Williams told Extra in 2020 that her parents got involved,
coordinating with the FBI to help relieve the burden of the danger she felt.
"As a 20-year-old winning overnight and having my world changed,
I was on my path to appearances, so I didn't know what I was doing.
My parents were not only the ones receiving the death threats and having a dialogue with the FBI,
but trying to allow me to have some kind of safe haven so I wouldn't be terrified."
In one of the most explosive controversies to ever hit the Miss America pageant,
Vanessa Williams was forced to forfeit her crown after winning in 1983,
when nude photos she posed for at age 19 for Penthouse became public.
In July 1984, Williams discovered that Penthouse planned to publish photos she took two years
earlier while working as a photographer's assistant. In an interview with People,
she said the photographer assured her the images -- which were originally meant to be used only
as silhouettes -- would never be published. Two years later, following Williams' rise to fame,
Penthouse paid the photographer the highest fee in the magazine's history
for the images and ran them. Subsequently, pageant officials gave her 72 hours to resign,
after which they would officially rescind her title. Williams told ABC News:
"It was two drastically different images [...] That was the issue. It was Miss America who's
really kind of untouched in that reality. And then there was this woman in a picture,
(exactly) the polar opposite of purity [...] and I was a normal kid in the middle."
"They took down the sign in Millwood, New York; "Home of Miss America.'"
Like many women in the public eye, Vanessa Williams struggled with body image issues
and self-esteem. The "Dreamin'" singer told Ebony in 1997 that,
during stressful times in her marriage to her first husband,
Ramon Hervey II, she dealt with the pressure by not eating and overcompensating by working out.
"I'd get on the treadmill and do an hour. When I get nervous,
I can't eat. People kept telling me how great I looked. But your clothes are falling off,
and you can't face another day. So I was looking my best when I was most miserable."
Williams, who is the proud mom of four children,
recalled the pressure she felt to change her body after becoming a mom. Entertainment
Tonight reported on an interview Williams did for The Talk in 2019, in which she said:
"I was asked to come in to meet for Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger. As a singer [...] I wasn't
used to being judged by how skinny I was. I remember being asked by the producer, 'Well,
we'd like you to lose some weight' [...] I literally went on a diet. I considered lipo,
just to be able to be on screen [...] I did a lot of Pilates and I haven't been that thin since."
In the years following the scandal that prompted Vanessa Williams to
relinquish her Miss America title, she became a celebrity pariah. She told ABC
News in 2015 that the controversy was no publicity stunt for her:
"That's crazy, to think that you can look at a scandal and think that that would be good for
your career, where for me, it took every ounce of credibility that I had [...] and wiped it out."
Cape Cod Times reported on a 2016 Town Hall in which Williams shared how she auditioned
for a Broadway show several years after her resignation, only to have the lyricist's wife
veto her casting, saying, quote, "Over my dead body will that whore be in my show".
"(Her) having that perception of me was when I realized what an obstacle I'd have."
In her 2012 memoir You Have No Idea, she wrote:
"For me, it seemed like an eternity in which I was the punch line to every late-night
monologue [...] I had to learn how not to take the attacks personally. All in all,
I lost about two million dollars in endorsements and
countless other offers that would have come my way once I finished my reign."
Vanessa Williams has experienced plenty of loves and losses in her romantic life. In 1987, Williams
married her manager Ramon Hervey II, whom she originally met when Hervey was a public relations
specialist assisting her with the fallout of her Miss America controversy. The couple welcomed
three children together — Melanie, Jillian, and Devin – before splitting a decade later.
Williams married NBA player Rick Fox in 1999, with the couple welcoming one child together,
daughter Sasha. Their five-year marriage ended in 2004,
with Williams telling Glamour in 2019 that Fox's career with the Los Angeles
Lakers meant he was away from her and her children on the opposite coast:
"He was on the road or out in Los Angeles, and after our daughter was born,
I was on the East Coast, raising four children and flying across the country every two weeks."
She also cited Fox's age, six years her junior, as another challenging
aspect of the relationship. They subsequently divorced in 2004.
In 2015, Williams found love again, marrying Jim Skrip,
a retired accountant whom she met in a "completely unexpected" encounter during a trip to Egypt.
In 2015, over 30 years after Vanessa Williams was publicly humiliated and stripped of her Miss
America crown, the organization finally apologized for the role its executives played in pressuring
her to give up her title. Williams appeared onstage at the Miss America pageant in 2015,
standing next to Sam Haskell, the pageant's chief executive. He said:
"Though none of us currently in the organization were involved then,
on behalf of today's organization, I want to apologize to you and to your mother,
Miss Helen Williams [...] I want to apologize for anything that was said or done that made
you feel any less than the Miss America you are and the Miss America you always will be."
Williams, who also took the Miss America stage to perform her song
"Oh How the Years Go By," thanked Haskell for his words as the crowd applauded.
"So unexpected, but so beautiful. I did the best that I could in my reign
as Miss America in 1983 to 1984 [...] I'm so honored to be back."
In 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests unfolded around the United States, Vanessa Williams spoke
out about the fear she felt for the safety of her four Black children. She told Extra:
"As a mother of a black son, you have that conversation very early. When you're walking
down the street with a group of your friends, guess who they're gonna pick? If they're all white
kids and you're the one black kid, they're gonna identify you. They're gonna remember your face."
Williams also took action following the death of George Floyd, joining forces with other Black
entertainment professionals to launch the Black Theatre United advocacy group, which aims to:
"[...] help protect Black people, Black talent and Black lives of all shapes and
orientations in theatre and communities across the country [...] through activism
in the pursuit of justice and equality for the betterment of all humanity."
Of the systemic problems brought to light by Floyd's death and the ensuing protests,
Williams told Good Housekeeping that racially-motivated violence as:
"[...] something that particularly Black mothers are fearful of when they see these
incidents arise time and time again [...] I have a Black son, so it simply needs to be addressed."
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