LGBT POV

When former Miss California Carrie Prejean first started acting up even before the brouhaha with Perez Hilton, Keith Lewis, State Director of the Miss California USA organization, told LGBT POV, he tried to remember he was dealing with a young woman with limited life experience.

But after Prejean, 22, was fired last August for breach of contract and subsequently filed suit against him and fellow Miss California USA official Shanna Moakler and publicist Roger Neal, Lewis and K2 Productions needed to respond.

On Monday, Lewis and K2 Productions filed a cross-complaint and demurrer in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Lewis said in a phone interview Monday night:

“We’re mentors of young women and I have to remember as the person who’s running this program that I’m dealing with young people. I have a 21-year-old son and a 23-year-old daughter. My son right now has decided he wants to be a professional poker player. So I appreciate the fact that people recognized that we tried to stay focused on facts, not feelings. In our complaint, we try to focus on the fact of behavior not on beliefs…..

[Prejean] treated us terribly. She violated her contract ten ways to Sunday – and she brought a suit against us. She was fired. [If she was] wrongly terminated, why wouldn’t she sue for breach of contract? She didn’t sue for breach of contract because she knows she breached the contract and she knows she should have been fired.
She sued for religious discrimination so that she could stand up and she could continue to foster this talking point that she’s been on.”

Prejean has consistently said that she came in second in the Miss USA pageant last April and was subsequently fired for her religious beliefs because of the way she answered a question posed by Hilton about legalizing same sex marriage.

Prejean said:

“I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other … same sex marriage or opposite marriage,” then added, “I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman … that’s how I was raised.”

When Prejean filed her lawsuit on August 31, her attorney, Charles S. LiMandri, issued this statement:

“Over the past two months we have worked hard to provide overwhelming evidence that Carrie Prejean did not violate her contract with Miss California USA and did not deserve to have her title revoked by Keith Lewis. We will make the case that her title was taken from her solely because of her support of traditional marriage. Keith Lewis has refused to clear her good name or even to admit any wrongdoing. Therefore, Carrie Prejean is left with no alternative but to take her case to court where she expects to be fully vindicated.”

The K2 Productions demurrer and cross-complaint counters with details and specific dates and documentation of what Lewis alleges are violations of their signed contract and other “completely belligerent and uncooperative” behavior that does not comport with the title representing the organization and California.

Specifically, the cross-complaint says that Prejean agreed to:

“give both the Miss Universe Organization and K2 control over rights to her name, likeness, and image; control over her public appearances; and control over her provision of any entertainment, literary, endorsement and related services, both in connection with the State Pageant and during her reign (if she won) as Miss California USA.”

Lewis told LGBT POV that Prejean’s argument in her lawsuit of slander and libel

“is crazy. Throughout the course of the time – we didn’t get down in the mud. We stayed to the points.

And behavior is very different from beliefs. Carrie is entitled to her beliefs – and she can believe all she wants about what transpired. But we have documented behavior and if you look at our lawsuit – we’re specifically giving emails where she says. ‘I’m not going to do this,’ ‘I’m not going there,’ ‘I’m not going to do what you tell me.’”

In fact, the K2 Production lawsuit alleges that Prejean’s lawsuit is an attempt “to extend her notoriety.”

Lewis told LGBT POV:

“There’s a great email in there that she sent to Shanna Moakler where she’s like, ‘What are you famous for anyway? You ought to be thanking me for extending your 15 minutes of fame.’ That to me speaks volumes.

It doesn’t matter that the person gets up with a talking point in front of a media person when they’ve got the puppet of the National Organization for Marriage with their hand up their back. It matters what they say when NOM doesn’t have their hand up their back.

And what Carrie said is very different – when you read all of those things – from anyone that I’ve ever dealt with who calls themselves a loving Christian.

We would have never brought this lawsuit had she not opened the door for it. And once she opened the door for it – once she decided that instead of moving on with her agenda in the way that she had, she was rightfully terminated for cause and we’ll prove that.

We brought the lawsuit in necessity. And now, at this point, she cast the first stone and what we’re doing is saying, ‘OK – now we’re going to give you the truth.’ And we’re looking to take all of the profits from her book. We’ll donate everything outside of the expense of what we have paid – to a cause that will counter some of the things she’s done, that would counter the damage that’s she done.”

Interestingly, Lewis seems almost more angry with NOM than with Prejean, the mentor and father-figure surfacing periodically during the interview.

“Carrie has really been recruited by a group of people who have a very specific agenda. And I think her life experience hasn’t taught her enough to understand that just because somebody is going to wrap you in a warm blanket and tell you you’re a fabulous person in the midst of a problem – it may not be the best thing for you to hear. If what they’re enabling you to do is more damage.

But unfortunately, she is a consenting adult and she has now done damage – damage to us, damage to our organization – damage to herself. Well, I can’t really say that. My god, she’s earning more money than she’s ever earned in her life – she’s got more opportunity than she’s ever had in her life. And I think she’s exploiting that.”

Carrie shouldn’t have been attacked when Perez Hilton – after the Miss USA Pageant. She spoke what she said in the moment that she said it, in a forum where she’s allowed to say it. And that’s where it should have ended.

Unfortunately afterwards I think a group really felt like, ‘Gosh, her message needs to resonate now that there’s a match of wits between her and Perez. We’re going to fuel that fire. And I think that other side really saw that as an opportunity and they kind of ran with it.

But NOM is not the only Religious Right influence on Prejean. She seems to be constantly in the company of pastor Miles McPherson.

Lewis was not too happy with McPherson from a religious standpoint.

“He was in New York with her from the moment she landed to do interviews after she answered her question. He rallied in California to much criticism on Prop 8 and brought other churches involved and propelled a message that was specific to his agenda of seeing that Prop 8 passed. He didn’t know who she was before she answered onstage. He didn’t know her.

I was raised in a very loving Christian family – very tight knot conservative Christian community and I tell you we did prayer circles for anybody who had any major event coming up. Miles McPherson didn’t know who Carrie Prejean was until she uttered those statements that fit into his specific agenda – and then he notice. I think the rest speaks for itself.”

Miles McPherson is pastor of The Rock Church in San Diego, CA, where Prejean has attended for the past four years, according to an interview with in the October issue of Church Executive magazine where he essentially takes credit as her spiritual guide.

McPherson told the Church Executive:

“When I met Carrie in New York it was the first question I asked her: Are you willing to give up your crown? Because if you don’t want to give up your crown, if you want to be politically-correct, then you can answer the questions one way. But if you want to stand up for the Lord at all costs, then you’ll answer the questions another way.”

Prejean now has a contract with right wing Regnery Publishing to write a book about her experiences, tentatively titled “Still Standing,” coming out in January.

Prop 8 watchers might remember McPherson as one of the main organizers of TheCall rally in Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego. He told the magazine:

“We were simply saying God designed a man to marry a woman; it is the metaphor of our relationship with Christ and that is what we should honor and not condone anything else….

I think what we are to learn is the culture is very strongly opposed to the Bible and people who walk with Christ are going to have to accept the fact that there is going to be confrontation and eventually persecution.”

(An hour long interview conducted by McPherson with Prejean at their church can be found here.)

Bruce Wilson is a longtime researcher into the Religious Right who blogs at Talk To Action.

I asked him for his opinion of McPherson. He said:

“Along with Samuel Rodriguez, Miles McPherson is one of the rising stars of the new evangelicalism, 2.0 if you will, which wraps traditional conservative evangelical positions – including antiabortion and anti-gay politics – in a swaddling cloth of impressively well crafted PR.

McPherson doesn’t seem to figure into the schematics that liberal journalists have constructed, mental maps of the religious right in which race baiting crowds to be found at “Tea Parties” are believed to be somehow representative of, or even supplanting, the Christian right. I very much doubt Miles McPherson or Sammy Rodriguez would be willing to get within a mile of a Tea Party event – for obvious and quite understandable reasons. The two evangelists represent constituencies that swung hard for Barack Obama in ‘08 but also, in California, helped vote in Proposition Eight.

In Miles McPherson you’ve got a rising Jamaican-American mega-pastor, a handsome all-American athlete who rides a motorcycle, is folksy, self-deprecating and laughs a lot onstage, who can reel off impressively long lists of anti-gay statistics that Timothy Kincaid, writing for Box Turtle Bulletin, states are flat out lies –

“These are lies. They are not misstatements, they are not exagerations [sic], they are not misunderstandings. They are deliberate and intentional demonizations of gay men and women with the express intent of horrifying the reader and firing them up to attack the civil rights and liberties of the segment of the population that McPherson despises.”

But McPherson delivers those lies with such seeming sincerity that I doubt his flock has any idea.

McPherson, per his own account, seems to have played a key role in the manufacture of the Christian right’s new Anita Bryant, Carrie Prejean, who he’s described as an “Esther”.

Watching McPherson’s almost one-hour onstage interview of Prejean, I foumd myself thinking that it was a spectacle to send old-guard white racists running for their nooses and shotguns – a black man anointing a white beauty queen. Imagine.

Well, that’s the new Christian right, the Rainbow Right, which claims to love gays while attacking the ‘gay lifestyle’ via cooked statistics and suggests same sex attraction stems from demon possession – but which is racially and ethnically inclusive unless one happens to be Jewish. And, it’s a tendency that is also aggressively promoting female leaders such as Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Carrie Prejean – ‘Esthers’ all.

We’ll be seeing a lot more of Miles McPherson, I’ve no doubt.

But one wonders what McPherson and his flock will think when more risqué images of Prejean come out, as Lewis predicts they will.

“If you read the complaint, you’ll see that we allege in the complaint that there are pictures that are much more graphic than the ones that were published. And there is video that is much more explicit. Parading in a bathing suit – I guess I’m a little bit confused about where you pick and choose your quotes from the Bible.”

What Lewis cares about now is getting back to the work of the organization.

“Our place isn’t to get involved on this argument [same sex marriage]. I wouldn’t want my title holders speaking for or against. It’s just not what we’re here to do. We’re here to bring the state together. We stick to issues that are more diplomatic. You can have your beliefs – that’s not a problem – but that’s not the official platform. Our official platform is diversity and we try and recognize diversity and we try promote diversity.”

To illustrate the point, Lewis notes that current Miss California, Tami Farrell, also does not believe in same sex marriage but -

“she’s out every single day, doing the job. Carrie had her own agenda. She had our banner. She had our funding [for breast augmentation, among other things] – and once she was done with what she needed from us, then she went about her own agenda and hijacked our crown and our banner and used it for her own gain.”

And how has Donald Trump reacted to all of this? Lewis said:

“Mr. Trump has been wonderful. He just taped all of our promos for the telecast – we’re telecasting for the first time in almost 20 years on Nov. 22 on the CW and MY Networks, 3:00-5:00 Pacific time (check local listings)”

Telecast producer Dana Miller (longtime columnist for Frontiers In LA) told me:

“We’re just gonna bust it up a bit. Have a pageant California style. The last year has proven anything can happen so we going with that. The most contestants ever! Great new venue in Rancho Mirage. Chris Jacobs from The Insider is the host. And, just for fun, we are crowning TWO Miss California USA’s during the telecast instead of one! Why?? Why not? It airs Sunday, November 22. It will be a wonderful tribute to a bunch of dedicated souls….And it will make for just terrific TV . I honestly can’t wait!”

Meanwhile, Lewis said of the cross-complaint against Prejean:

“We’ve put this down and we’ve said, ‘OK we’re more than happy to move forward in the arena that you want to bring this – the legal arena. We look forward to our day in court and the opportunity of making sure everyone’s very aware of what transpired and seeing that we take the profits that she wrongfully gained from her upcoming book that she’s not authorized to publish and from all of her appearances for the National Organization for Marriage and others when she was under our banner – and we donate that to a worthy cause. I think the court will really look at the behavior and we believe that we’ll prevail and that we’ll prevail on all of it – anything she profits from being Miss California.”

You can read the entire cross complaint here and the demurrer here.