Miss USA Tara Conner
Eight months after winning the Miss USA title in 2006, Conner almost lost her crown when she tested positive for cocaine. Instead of firing her, pageant owner Donald Trump gave her a second chance and sent her to drug rehab.
PARENTS' DIVORCE WAS TRIGGER
Conner, 24, has been clean and sober ever since, but spoke out about her years of underage drinking, self-inflicted injuries (cutting) and rape at the age of 14.
Tara's rapid decline into drug addiction began at 14, when her parents divorced and her grandfather died.
"I feel like I was crying out for help, but no one could hear me because everyone was so concerned with their own life," Conner said on the Oprah show April 28.
Tara began doing drugs to mask the pain and loneliness she felt. "I started using when I was 14 years old," she recalls. "I had my first drink when I was 14."
'I SOMETIMES TOOK 30 PAINKILLERS A DAY'
She adds: "It wasn't me moving to New York and becoming Miss USA that put all this pressure on me. It wasn't that at all. I had the disease of alcoholism from the get-go."
Soon, Conner moved on to potent prescription painkillers like Vicodin. "I started taking Percocet, Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, morphine pills, methadone [and] OxyContin," she recounts. "It consumed every minute of my day. There would be times where I could do 30 pain pills in a day."
One night, after Tara had been drinking and popping pills with friends, she found herself alone with a man. Stoned out of her mind, Conner says she didn't protest when the man picked her up and carried her to his car and raped her.
"I didn't do anything about it," she recalls. "I just sat there. I was like: 'Wow. Everyone else hurts me. Now, what are you going to do?'
'I FELT LIKE DAMAGED GOODS'
Like many drug addicts, Tara felt helpless and hopeless.
"I would bring on all of these situations and put myself through this pain because I felt so dirty," she says. "I felt so ashamed and I felt like damaged goods. I expected these [bad] things to happen to me."
As her life spun out of control and began to revolve around her drug use and beauty pageants, Conner began cutting herself to numb the pain she felt.
"It was a controlled pain," she says. "For cutters, if you are having a moment or had a feeling—because, heaven forbid, we feel—it's a way of controlling what you're feeling."
Whenever Tara got in trouble at school or got bad grades, all she had to do was win a beauty pageant, and authority figures would excuse her behavior. "My name was in the papers," she says. "And [people thought], 'Well, she can't be a drug addict if she's winning pageants.'"
'LYING BECAME A WAY OF LIFE'
Meanwhile, Tara's mom, Brenda Sutton, says Conner learned early on how to avoid getting caught. "There were times when I would hear rumors, and I would confront her," says Sutton. "But she had a way of telling me what I wanted to hear. She knew what to say to me so that I could believe her. She was a master manipulator."
Tara says lying and manipulating became a way of life. After a while, she told so many lies and did so many drugs that she says she didn't know who she was anymore.
Shockingly, Conner was doing drugs the entire time she competed in pageants — even while competing on Miss USA.
"I was doing pain pills the entire time," she reveals. When officials announced she was the winner, Tara was numb from the Xanax she had taken earlier that day.
'I WAS NEVER ENOUGH FOR ME'
"Everyone thought I was professional and this sweet girl who showed up for what I needed to show up for," she says. "Everyone thinks the pageant girls are Polly Purebred perfect. You can't make a mistake, but on the inside, I felt dirty. I felt ashamed. I felt less than, not enough. I was never enough for me."
When she was finally caught in her web of lies eight months into her Miss USA reign, Conner was relieved. "Part of me was like, 'Wow, all of my skeletons are out there,'" she says. "There's a freedom that comes with that."
Tara, who has been sober for over three years now, is happy with how her life is unfolding. "Every day I learn something new about myself," she says. "I'm allowing myself to feel. I'm allowing myself to love. I'm allowing myself to feel pain where I wouldn't before."
Featured Article: Miss USA Tara Conner: 'I abused drugs, alcohol and was a cutter' originally appeared on Examiner.com on April 28, 4:52 PM
