At the time, Alicia Machado had said she starved herself and wished to return to a healthier weight.
The old article opens with a jarring scene: There's Alicia Machado, the reigning Miss Universe, skipping rope in a Manhattan gym. She stands 5'9 and weighs 149 pounds, a medically healthy size.
There's also Donald Trump, watching her.
From People magazine in 1997 :
"Trump, at the gym to oversee his investment's crown jewel, blew off any suggestions that Machado had eaten herself out of her tiara. 'We want her to stay as Miss Universe,' he said, 'and she is working on her problem.'
"The issue, though, is a weighty one for the Donald, himself a robust 6 foot 2. 'When you win a beauty pageant,' he said, 'people don't think you're going to go from 118 to 160 in less than a year, and you really have an obligation to stay in a perfect physical state.' "
The story resurfaced during Monday night's presidential debate. "He called this woman Miss Piggy," Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, defended his actions Tuesday morning on "Fox and Friends."
"That person was a Miss Universe person," he said of the former beauty queen. "And she was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst. She was impossible. . . . And she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem."
At the time, Machado told The Washington Post she had starved herself and wished to return to a healthier weight after the pageant. The Post reported that Machado was nine pounds below a healthy weight as defined by the American Medical Association when she won the title. It was when she got into a healthy weight range that rumors started circulating that she might lose the crown.
Machado spoke in Spanish of her relationship with Trump in a Clinton campaign ad, released Tuesday: "He'd yell at me all the time. He'd tell me 'you look ugly' or 'you look fat.' "
Though bullying a woman about her looks has never been socially acceptable, today's world is increasingly body-positive. Sports Illustrated, for example, put a size-16 model on the front of this year's swimsuit edition.
But overweight women still face discrimination at work. They earn less, on average, than their thinner peers. They encounter vicious harassment on the streets and online. "For the past sixteen years, my body has been picked apart, manipulated, and controlled by others who don't understand it," wrote Ashley Graham, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, in an essay for Lenny Letter.
Even slight weight gain triggers judgment.
A study from the journal Plos One, out this month, found going up just one size can hurt a job seeker's employment chances, especially a woman's.
" We found that the marginally 'heavier' female faces were rated lower on hireability than the original faces," the authors asserted. The finding persisted across healthy body weights.
Beyond economic opportunities, such prejudice attacks self-worth. In "Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman," author Lindy West described her personal experience with the stigma.
"What do you do when you're too big, in a world where bigness is cast not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing?" she wrote. "You fold yourself up like origami, you make yourself smaller in other ways, you take up less space with your personality, since you can't with your body. You diet. You starve, you run until you taste blood in your throat, you count out your almonds, you try to buy back your humanity with pounds of flesh."
(c) 2016, The Washington Post
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
There's also Donald Trump, watching her.
From People magazine in 1997 :
"Trump, at the gym to oversee his investment's crown jewel, blew off any suggestions that Machado had eaten herself out of her tiara. 'We want her to stay as Miss Universe,' he said, 'and she is working on her problem.'
"The issue, though, is a weighty one for the Donald, himself a robust 6 foot 2. 'When you win a beauty pageant,' he said, 'people don't think you're going to go from 118 to 160 in less than a year, and you really have an obligation to stay in a perfect physical state.' "
The story resurfaced during Monday night's presidential debate. "He called this woman Miss Piggy," Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, defended his actions Tuesday morning on "Fox and Friends."
"That person was a Miss Universe person," he said of the former beauty queen. "And she was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst. She was impossible. . . . And she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem."
At the time, Machado told The Washington Post she had starved herself and wished to return to a healthier weight after the pageant. The Post reported that Machado was nine pounds below a healthy weight as defined by the American Medical Association when she won the title. It was when she got into a healthy weight range that rumors started circulating that she might lose the crown.
Machado spoke in Spanish of her relationship with Trump in a Clinton campaign ad, released Tuesday: "He'd yell at me all the time. He'd tell me 'you look ugly' or 'you look fat.' "
Though bullying a woman about her looks has never been socially acceptable, today's world is increasingly body-positive. Sports Illustrated, for example, put a size-16 model on the front of this year's swimsuit edition.
But overweight women still face discrimination at work. They earn less, on average, than their thinner peers. They encounter vicious harassment on the streets and online. "For the past sixteen years, my body has been picked apart, manipulated, and controlled by others who don't understand it," wrote Ashley Graham, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, in an essay for Lenny Letter.
Even slight weight gain triggers judgment.
A study from the journal Plos One, out this month, found going up just one size can hurt a job seeker's employment chances, especially a woman's.
" We found that the marginally 'heavier' female faces were rated lower on hireability than the original faces," the authors asserted. The finding persisted across healthy body weights.
Beyond economic opportunities, such prejudice attacks self-worth. In "Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman," author Lindy West described her personal experience with the stigma.
"What do you do when you're too big, in a world where bigness is cast not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing?" she wrote. "You fold yourself up like origami, you make yourself smaller in other ways, you take up less space with your personality, since you can't with your body. You diet. You starve, you run until you taste blood in your throat, you count out your almonds, you try to buy back your humanity with pounds of flesh."
(c) 2016, The Washington Post
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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