It has been reported that the newly crowned Miss USA was actually not living in Nevada, her home state which she represented at the pageant.
- Jun 14, 2014
AceShowbiz - The newly crowned Miss USA 2014 Nia Sanchez, who represented Nevada as her home state at the beauty pageant in Baton Rouge, La., on June 8, was recently hit with controversy. Report said that she was not actually living in Nevada before she was crowned.
"She never actually moved to Nevada, but continued to work at Disney and live in California, setting up some minimum paper trail to appear like she was in Nevada and allow her to compete," a source claimed, "Shanna Moakler is the Nevada director, and she personally coached Nia on what she needed to do to qualify in Nevada and skirt around the need to be actually from there."
Nia slammed the allegation in an interview with Fox411, saying that there's "no truth" to the allegation that she was helped by the Nevada director more than other contestants. She also claimed that she had lived in Nevada almost 18 months before she won the title, which was longer than the minimum requirement of six months.
Nia explained, "[Las Vegas] is my home. I have a house there with a friend. I actually had an agent that was working [with me] in Nevada a lot so I figured why not work in that state, and then I looked into the pageant program because I had done pageants before."
"So I figured why not look into the one in Nevada? I really liked the way that it was run, the director that ran it, it seemed like a really healthy, well-run state program," she added, "So I decided to go there since I was living there anyway."
Fox411 revealed that Nia had competed for the Miss California crown from 2010 to 2012 but failed to win each time.
The Miss Nevada official competition page stated that contestants must submit two documents that showed they had stayed in the state they were going to compete for at least six months before the pageant.
Nia who already followed the requirement said, "You shouldn't be able to live in a different state and compete in a different state. That doesn't seem fair to me. But that's why there's the six-month residency rule and you have to work or go to school in that state, which I did."
