New Miss Ukraine refuses to give up crown after disqualification for being a divorced mother
Organizers say Veronika Didusenko knowingly broke the rules of the beauty contest, while the 23-year-old model has vowed to fight “discrimination” and says she plans represent Ukraine at the upcoming Miss World competition.
It took journalists just two days after last week’s pageant to discover that the Kiev-born winner of Miss Ukraine is divorced, and has a 4 year-old son, Aleksandr. This contravenes the rules of both the national competition, and Miss World, which will take place in China in December.
“This is a very unfortunate story,” said Viktoria Kiose, the executive director of Miss Ukraine. “She signed the contract, and agreed to its conditions. She flouted the rules and lied to us, so we disqualified her.”
Kiose noted that letting the brunette finance and investment student walk the podium in Miss World could have led to Ukraine being expelled from the competition altogether.
But Didusenko isn’t giving up easily.
While she has thanked her “fantastic” fans for supporting her “at this difficult time,” her current boyfriend, well-known businessman Gennady Kurochka, vowed through his Facebook “to battle to reverse this anachronism” that the couple consider to be “discriminatory.”
Organizers have told Didusenko that while she will be stripped of her $10,000 prize, they won’t be demanding that she reimburse their expenses, and have scheduled for a new winner to be named this Sunday.
While to have this happen once is a calamity, this is actually the fourth time since 1995 that the winner of Miss Ukraine has been subsequently outed as a mother of a child.
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