Alicia Machado weighed in on her reign as Donald Trump’s first Miss Universe winner Tuesday, blaming the GOP nominee for her eating disorder, which she claims resulted from his continuous taunts and insults.
“I wouldn’t eat, and would still see myself as fat, because a powerful man had said so,” Machado said in a new ad released by the Clinton campaign. “I felt really bad, like a lab rat.”
Machado goes on to say that, “long after, I was stuck with eating disorders.” (In an interview with the New York Times in May, Machado said she suffered from anorexia for five years following the ordeal).
“He was overwhelming,” Machado continued. “I was very scared of him. He’d yell at me all the time. He’d tell me, ‘You look ugly,’ or ‘You look fat.’”
Now 39, Machado was 18 when she won the Miss Universe title. Not only was she humiliated by Trump’s barrage of insults, she claims Trump stiffed her too.
“As Miss Universe I did more ad campaigns than most,” Machado said. “By contract I should have earned 10 percent on all the commercials and work I did. I was never paid.”
Machado found herself back in the headlines after Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of calling the pageant winner “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” during Monday night’s highly-anticipated presidential debate in New York. Trump defended himself on Tuesday, telling “Fox & Friends” that Machado “was the winner and you know, she gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem. We had a real problem.”
In an interview with Howard Stern in 1997, unearthed by BuzzFeed on Tuesday, Trump called Machado an “eating machine,” adding that, “she ate a lot of everything.”
When stern said that “Miss Universe, it turns out, the woman who won last year, blows up to a fat pig. I mean, like obese,” Trump can be heard chuckling in the background.
“You whipped this fat slob into shape,” Stern went on to say. “I don’t know how you did it. I see all these diet plans, everything else. God bless you. You whipped her into shape, and you held the whole pageant together. Congratulations.”
“Well, that was an amazing one,” Trump quipped. “She went from 118 to almost 170.”
In an interview with Newsweek at the time, Trump complained, “We’ve tried diet, spa, a trainer, incentives. Forget it, the way she’s going, she’d eat the whole gymnasium.”
He then invited reporters to watch Machado exercise, hoping to turn her weight loss into “a big event.”
But Karma is a funny thing. As TheWrap previously reported, Trump himself may be an inch away from obesity these days, weighing 236 pounds according to his doctors. And as Clinton warned Trump during the debate on Monday, Machado, now a U.S. citizen, is planning on voting this year — and it ain’t gonna be for her former boss.
I received my passport ! I'm ready to vote For my country for you @HillaryClinton for my daughter For women workers pic.twitter.com/U5lSwWxiHc
— Alicia Machado (@machadooficial) September 27, 2016
You can see Macho’s Clinton ad above and listen to Trump’s interview with Stern below.