Alicia Machado, Miss Universe weight-shamed by Trump, speaks out for Clinton
Clinton made the former Miss Universe turned actor and activist a
talking point of the first debate, criticizing Trump’s public comments
about her weight
Alicia Machado became an American citizen just in time to vote against Donald Trump. It’s a vote that has been a long time coming.
In May 1996, the Venezuelan beauty queen was just 19 years old when
she was crowned the winner of the Miss Universe pageant, which had
recently been bought by the Manhattan business mogul. That year should
have been one of sheer happiness and possibility for Machado, and for a
moment it was. “I remember I hug my mom and I tell her, now our lives is
going to be changed forever,” she told the Guardian in an interview in
her adopted hometown of Los Angeles.
But when she put on weight soon after winning, Trump turned what
should have been a golden year into the most traumatizing one of her
life. It wasn’t just that Trump shamed her about about gaining weight,
calling her things like “Miss Piggy” and “an eating machine”. It wasn’t
even that he did so publicly. It was that he did it with the biggest
audience he could find, in an attempt to sear her weight fluctuation
into the public consciousness, forever changing how she would be
remembered.
Then on Monday night, in a twist of cosmic justice, Trump – now the
Republican nominee for president – was presented with a bigger audience
for his comments about Machado’s weight than he ever could have
imagined, or wanted.
In what has been billed as the most-watched debate in presidential history, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton made Trump’s remarks to Machado a centerpiece of their first televised clash, citing the name-calling
– in particular, Trump calling her “Miss Housekeeping” in reference to
her Latina origins – as a prime example of her opponent’s demeaning
views about women.
Trump’s treatment of Machado reached its nadir in January 1997 when,
having put the recently crowned Miss Universe on a stringent diet and
exercise regime, he scheduled a trip with her to a New York City gym.
There he blindsided her with dozens of cameramen, who gathered to film
her jumping rope, lifting weights and pedaling a stationary bike. Trump
cast himself in the role of disapproving dad, leaning over Machado as
she hid her mortification behind a show of charms only the world’s top
beauty queen could have mustered, laughing along with reporters and even
once planting a kiss on Trump’s cheek.
Alicia Machado of Venezuela reacts as she is crowned Miss Universe on 17 May 1996. Photograph: Eric Draper/AP
Although she appeared happy, smiling for the crowd of cameras as she
dutifully skipped rope, she tells the Guardian she felt like a mouse in a
cage, running endlessly on her fixed wheel for the entertainment of
others. “I was in some gym in New York like a mouse,” she said. “Look at
that mouse: how she run, how she jump, how she make exercise. Like
that. In that moment is when … problems come to me and start.”
The media loved the spectacle, and so did Trump, who didn’t
hesitate to pass out some memorable if fallacious tidbits himself. “She
weighed 118 pounds or 117 pounds and she went up to 170, so this is
somebody who likes to eat,” he said in an interview at the time. In fact
Machado says she gained only a fraction of that weight but she didn’t
dare correct him; she was already frightened he’d make good on a threat
to strip her of her crown if she didn’t follow through on the
performance at the gym. (Trump’s campaign did not return a request for
comment.)
Machado never did lose her crown, but she lost her health for a time.
Though she had never suffered from eating disorders previously, in the
years that followed the ordeal at the gym, she struggled with anorexia
and bulimia. It took five years before she was fully recovered, and
longer before she could talk about what she went through. Now she hopes
to use the insights gleaned to help teenagers struggling to love their
bodies.
“No matter what, no matter who tells you that you don’t look good,
that is only outside,” she said, speaking partly, perhaps, to her
younger self. “You are more than some weight. You are more than some
phase. You are more than if you are short or tall, or you are black or
you are white, or you are skinny or fat or whatever. Your value is how
you can work, how you can feel for the people around you.”
She added: “In this moment 20 years later, the only thing I need to
say is I’m a really happy person. I’m a very successful person. I have
my family, my daughter, my career, my dreams, my ideas.” Referring to
Trump’s character, she said: “And he can’t be a president of the United
States of America.”
That Machado is thriving these days was readily apparent from where
she sat in her publicist’s fourth-floor office in West Hollywood, and
apparent in many different realms. She has traded pageants for success
as an actor, starring in a string of telenovelas – a childhood dream
come true. She is also a successful businesswoman, with a line of
products bearing her name. And she is the proud mother of a
seven-year-old girl, whose privacy she fiercely protects; a question
about whether she would encourage her daughter to compete in beauty
pageants was met with stern disapproval.
More recently, she has added another title to her list of identities: activist. In June, Machado teamed up with civil rights icon Dolores Huerta
in Virginia to join immigrant advocacy groups in encouraging Latinos to
register – and to vote for Clinton. She took her own advice to heart,
too. On 19 August she became a registered US citizen, pledging in a post on Instagram
to cast her ballot for Clinton. Later that month she traveled to
Florida to lend her star power to a Clinton campaign drive to register
Latino voters, posting video excerpts from the trip to social media
accounts.
Her celebrity is at the nexus of two very important voter groups this
election cycle, and they are groups overwhelmingly supportive of
Clinton: women and Latinos. Both have been broadly insulted by Trump, who has called Mexican immigrants “rapists”
and regularly refers to women as animals; Machado has the dubious
distinction of being the recipient of both racial and gender-specific
slurs, a powerful reference point that certainly isn’t lost on the
Clinton campaign.
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“Alicia
Machado has seen first hand the dangerous impact Trump’s hateful and
divisive rhetoric can have on people,” a Clinton spokesperson said of
Machado’s involvement with the campaign. “As a Latina, as a first-time
voter and as a respected leader in the Latino community, Alicia has
become an invaluable voice of our campaign to help mobilize Latinos
against Trump’s bigoted agenda and to educate the community about
Hillary’s plans to build a better future for them.”
In the first presidential debate on Monday, Machado’s value could
scarcely have been more evident. Clinton’s strongest moment in an
already impressive debate performance – arguably her strongest moment in the cycle
– came near the end when she seized on a question about what Trump had
meant when he had said she didn’t “look” presidential. Trump tried to
deflect the damaging line of inquiry, saying he had actually been
questioning her stamina. Clinton wasn’t having it; and she used the
concrete details of Machado’s story to pull him back in the ring of
fire.
“He tried to switch from looks to stamina, but this is a man who has
called women pigs, slobs, and dogs, and someone who has said, ‘Pregnancy
is an inconvenience to employers.’ Who has said, ‘Women don’t deserve
equal pay unless they do as good of a job as men,’” Clinton said as
Trump tried to protest.
“One of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty
contest,” Clinton continued. “Her name is Alicia Machado and she has
become a US citizen, and you can bet she’s going to vote this November.”
It was a rare moment in which Trump’s words were effectively weaponized
against him. And, for the first time all debate, Trump had noticeably
lost his cool, switching focus to offensive comments he had made about
TV personality Rosie O’Donnell and saying: “I think everybody would
agree that she deserves it and nobody feels sorry for her.”
Another measure of the attack’s effectiveness came the following
morning, when Trump was asked on Fox and Friends what, if anything, from
the debate had gotten under his skin. Without hesitation he singled out Machado. “She was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst. She was impossible,” he said of the former beauty queen.
“She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight and it
was a problem,” Trump continued. “We had a real problem, not only that,
her attitude and we had a real problem with her. Hillary went back into
the years and found the girl and talked about her like she was Mother
Teresa and it wasn’t quite that way, but that’s OK.”
But it isn’t 1996 any more; Machado, far from being a girl, is a
39-year-old woman, and if body-shaming constituted good press for
Trump’s fledgling beauty pageant business then, it seems less of a good
look for his presidential campaign today. It’s a similar case with his
continued insistence on how right he is to call women out for their
weight. Machado understands this, perhaps even more acutely than
Clinton, because she’s lived it; and she is willing to relive and keep
reliving this painful episode if it means shedding light on a man she
feels has no business anywhere near the Oval Office.
On a call organized by the Clinton campaign on Tuesday afternoon
billed as a chance to let Machado respond to Trump’s most recent
attacks, the former beauty queen was much more interested in talking
about his Democratic rival, whose mention of her story in the debate the
night before had moved her to tears. She “never imagined it would
matter to someone so powerful”, she said.
But as someone who straddles two powerful voting blocs this election
cycle, Machado is a double threat to Trump, and she feels that her
celebrity means she has a responsibility to speak up about her
experiences when they can help people. “If I can be a voice for my
Latino community in this moment, I will do it,” she told the Guardian.
It’s not just a matter of Trump: a few years ago she survived a
battle with breast cancer, and as a person of faith, she said she
struggled to make sense of why God sent her such a challenge. Tearing up
ever so slightly for the first time in an hour-long interview, she said
she finally determined it was because she needed to share her story:
“People believe in my words,” she said. “People look at me as a strong
person. That is my character – I’m a strong woman.”
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