Carrie Prejean: The Money Making Potential of Bad Decisions

November 11, 1:46 PMEconomy ExaminerChristine Buske

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Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California USA, is making the most of her economic setbacks. After being removed from the Miss USA pageant, she has now written a book about her ordeals. Shortly before she started her publicity tour for the book, a sex-tape she made when she
was 17 years old surfaced, and it promptly ended the lawsuits started by Carrie Prejean against the pageant.

Apparently, a settlement was reached although the details of it remain undisclosed. Carrie Prejean demanded more than a million dollars in the settlement, but dropped the lawsuit when she was confronted with the sextape she made a few years ago. Clearly it does not suit Prejean to talk about the particulars of the new deal, because in interviews she claims to "uphold her end of the agreement" by now discussing the particular. Considering Carrie Prejean previously signed a contract stating
she had not appeared in any nude or semi-nude photography or video, she clearly doesn't always seem to think so highly of contract law.

What puzzles me is the economic aspect of the situation though. Enough people are talking about her sex tape, and enough people have seen the infamous video of her Miss USA interview. The question really is whether anyone who makes bad decisions in life, and then enjoys 15 minutes of (negative) fame, can write a book and make money from it.

Carrie Prejean almost stood to lose the proceeds from her book to begin with, as the contract she signed when she joined the pageant also stipulates that everything she writes is owned by the pageant. Considering her sproken verbal skills, I personally do not expect too much from her writing either. But who knows, with some time and away from the
stressful lime lights, Miss Prejean might actually produce something worth reading.

The fact that Carrie Prejean changes her tune to suit her current money-making venture doesn't help her credibility, nor am I impressed with the publisher.
Here we have a young woman who outright lies by signing a contract with promises she cannot make, then proceeds to get breast implants, paid for with pageant money, and then when things don't work out with the beauty aspects of her ambition she writes a book (titled "Still Standing") stating that girls should be "admired for their hearts, not for showing skin to look sexy." In the mean time, Carrie Prejean had breast implants and walked around in a bikini showing off most of her skin in an attempt to win the Miss USA pageant.

Carrie Prejean also made sex-tape when she was seventeen, but now writes negatively in her book about pornography. Whether or not she was stripped from her title later, she is/was a beauty queen, who now writes "Girls grow up in a culture where it is hard to have an innocent, healthy normal view of themselves..."

If it wouldn't be making her money, would she really write this? Carrie Prejean participated in pageants, which are all about outer beauty, yet now that she was fired and stripped from her crown, she believes girls should not be fed the ideals and images she was perpetuating herself not too long ago.
Did Carrie really change her mind, or is she preaching against beauty, porn, and pageants to make money? Certainly, her new book paints her as a victim in the entire ordeal, although I think Carrie Prejean should just think before she speaks and learn to take responsibility for her actions.

After all, when the going gets tough we cannot all write a book about how others caused us to make the wrong decisions, and then make money from it...