BY AMY Z. QUINN Officials from the Miss New Jersey Pageant have received a second package of photos from a blackmailer apparently trying to see 22-year-old Amy Polumbo stripped of her recently-won crown. Somebody call Sam Waterston — we’ve got the makings of a totally Jerz-tastic episode of “Law & Order” goin’ on.
On Sunday, just as speculation began to heat up that maybe this wasn’t all a publicity stunt by Miss NJ herself, pageant officials said they got the second batch, planning to meet to discuss their next move at 2 p.m. Thursday. The spokesman for Miss NJ, the same guy who brought you Ocean City’s annual Miss Crustacean competition, expressed support for Polubmo after the first package arrived but seemed to be holding his cards closer to the vest in Parte Deux.
“I can’t tell you what I’m going to do (Thursday), but to me the first photos were something taken at a typical college party,” Soifer said. “If the person was trying to be fair . . . they wouldn’t have tried to put insinuating captions on them.
“We want to be fair to her (Polumbo),” said Soifer . . . [Asbury Park Press]
This story brings the crazy in so many ways it’s hard to know where to begin — is it cruelly ironic, or suspicious,
that Polumbo’s Miss NJ platform deals with Internet safety? Was taking a stand, or taking the bait, when Polumbo took to the “Today” show this morning to call her blackmailer “a miserable person”?
And most importantly, when does anyone stop giving a flying tiara that a young women got drunk at a college party and showed her tits? In this, the Age Of Ubiquity when it comes to the availability of digital photography, this whole “scandal” seems as last century, as beside-the-point, as the beauty pageant itself. It can’t be a surprise to Polumbo, who’s still a newbie in the pageant game, that these organizations’ moral rules-and-regs clauses will ensure that their scholarship competitions attract only robo-babes raised in the JonBenet-like unreality of the pageant circuit.
It’s also not news in 2007, that photos never die, or that there are miserable people in the world, shit-stirrers who actually think there’s any such thing as anonymity on the Internet. To me, the only really newsworthy angle to this whole thing is what happens this afternoon after that meeting at the Ocean City Music Pier, and what happens when the state Attorney General figures out who’s behind this nonsense.