Miss America Kira Kazantsev says she only hazed a little bit and made some bad jokes, so what’s the big deal?
In a total softball interview on Good Morning America — aired on ABC, not coincidentally the same network that airs the Miss America pageant — the beauty queen tried to explain away the behavior that got her kicked out of her sorority, Alpha Phi, during her senior year at Hofstra University in New York.
“Under the broad definition of hazing, I was involved… It was part of the culture at Hofstra at the time,” Kazantsev explained, adding that the hazing in question consisted of “having to stand in a line and recite information, perform mundane tasks and participate in crafting… and a few traditional things.”
The blond cup player denied that her hazing activities are what caused her to be unceremoniously kicked to the curb by her sorority, but rather a bad joke in an email that she says was taken out of context.
“I was asked by an educator to reach out to new students, and I made a joke, which was taken out of context and sent to the national office,” she said. “The joke was that we would make the evening scary for the pledges at an event, which never came to fruition.”
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Kazantsev’s story does not jibe with what an insider told Jezebel: That the new member educator and recruitment committee president was extremely harsh with pledges, calling them names, berating them over physical flaws and making them perform physical tasks “to the point of bruising and exhaustion.”
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