The Slatest

Miss America Winner Was Kicked Out of College Sorority (Update: Kazantsev Responds)

Kazantsev. Isn’t it weird that Miss America wears a crown? Shouldn’t she wear a ballot box?

Rob Kim/Getty

Newly crowned Miss America Kira Kazantsev was kicked out of a Hofstra University sorority for perpetrating abusive hazing practices, Jezebel reports. The site says “a tipster close to Kazantsev” reports that the new paegant queen, while acting as “Recruitment Committee President” for Alpha Phi, supervised a process in which “pledges in the incoming class were called names, berated for their perceived physical flaws and imperfections, and made to perform physical tasks to the point of bruising and exhaustion.” The administration became involved after a tip:

When someone reported Kazantsev and her friend for “dirty pledging,” Hofstra didn’t turn a blind eye. After a months-long investigation into their actions, our source says, the pair was expelled from Alpha Phi in late 2013 and told they could no longer participate in any sorority activities, including the end-of-year formal.

Jezebel says other students confirmed this account, and the Miss America organization acknowledged Kazantsev’s “termination” from Alpha Phi in a statement. 

Update, September 23, 2014: Kazantsev writes in a blog post that she was “never involved in any physical hazing or any degradation of physical appearance of any kind” at Hofstra and that she was terminated from Alpha Phi for missing a disciplinary hearing related to an email she wrote that was misinterpreted.