It can’t be easy being Carrie Prejean. Last April she outed herself as a homophobe on national TV, which doubtlessly crippled Miss California 2009’s chances of capturing the Miss USA crown. Yet the experience transformed the 21-year-old into a Joan of Arc for family values groups, especially after the Miss California 
organizers took away Prejean’s title when topless photos of her surfaced, taken when Prejean was 17 and 20.
Those fashion shoot-type images were dismissed by her conservative apologists as youthful indiscretions. Even her breast implants were discounted as body parts that were forced upon her by pageant organizers. Now it’s emerged that Prejean made a sex tape when she was 17. TMZ says it obtained a copy of the video “months ago” but will not post it.
It’s not a sex tape in the storied, narcissistic tradition of a Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton, but a kind of onanistic valentine sent to her boyfriend at the time. The news came out after Prejean last week dropped her libel/religious discrimination lawsuit against the Miss California pageant – apparently fearing the tape would be shown as evidence in court.
The timing is bad, if only because Prejean’s latest scandal broke too late to appear as a chapter in Prejean’s new autobiography. That, and the fact that she’s promoting the book as a family values icon hailing from the San Diego County community of Vista, which in 1992 memorably stacked its school board with hard-core creationists.
Among other things, Prejean’s book, “Still Standing,” reveals her budding friendship with Sarah Palin, who has taken her under her wing. Indeed, Prejean is part of the angry pantheon of such conservative insta-heroes as Joe the Plumber and Congressman Joe Wilson. In one of the book’s doofier and oft-quoted passages, the thinking and articulation of Prejean’s new mentor is unmistakable: “‘Homophobic,’” Prejean wrote, “is merely a made-up word to try to force everyone to be politically correct on gay marriage or risk being accused of being hateful.”
On Monday Prejean received a sympathetic hearing on Fox News’ Sean Hannity program and no wonder – Hannity wrote her book’s forward. Her account to Hannity of how her video came about make the circumstances sound as innocent as someone locking themselves out of their home:
“I was all by myself and no one was in the room with me. I was not having sex with anyone.”
The next day on NBC’s “Today” with Meredith Vieira, Prejean went further: “I was not having sex … there has been a campaign against me, to silence me, for the last seven months.”
Here she almost sounded like Bill Clinton: I did not have sex with that woman — who was me.
Prejean’s is only the latest homemade sex video to come to light. So many celebrity bedroom documentaries have emerged – and gone straight to porn video, as it were – that many people might question the auteurs’ real intentions for making them.
A couple of weeks ago actress/Playboy model Shauna Sand announced she was dropping a threatened lawsuit to block Vivid Entertainment from marketing a pirated video she’d made with a boyfriend. Instead, she and the adult entertainment giant agreed to cooperate on the project – with Sand taking a cut of the profits, while taking charge of the video’s editing and music.
Sand denied to TheWrap that this video (“I have other tapes from other husbands and keep my fingers crossed that they don’t show up”) was anything but a purloined tape taken during a Miami hotel-room theft. She’d chosen to make the best of a bad situation.
What advice would Sand give Prejean, given the good odds of Carrie’s auto-erotic epic finding its way to market?
“When I first heard about my tape I was a basket case, I didn’t know what to do,” says Sand. “I would tell her to just accept it, to see everything in a positive light and not let it destroy her existence. And move forward. And don’t make any more – don’t do it again.”
But if the news cycle teaches us anything, it’s that Carrie Prejean is full of surprises. Vivid Entertainment today renewed a $1 million offer made in May to Prejean to star in one of its porn films. Who knows? She may be a vice presidential candidate some day.
