From the young age of 12 to age 18, the former Miss Delaware Teen USA, Melissa King, lived in foster homes with no money, no family and suffered from severe anxiety and depression. At age 18, she made a terrible mistake and filmed an amateur porn film for a website that pays young girls, who are desperate for money, to have sex on camera.
Last year, King started to turn her life around and competed in local beauty pageants that ended with her winning Miss Delaware Teen USA. On Tuesday, a decision she made when she was 18 years old, forced her to relinquish her crown.
“The Miss Delaware Teen USA pageant has received a resignation letter from Miss King’s attorney,” Dara Busch, a spokesperson for the pageant, told the Delaware News Journal yesterday.
It’s easy for Donald Trump and the media to sit and judge Melissa King for a bad decision she made as a desperate, broke teenage girl, but before we condemn Ms King for her poor decision, maybe we should try walking in her shoes.
While the state provided her with government supervision and therapy sessions, she lacked the monetary support that lined the pockets of other teenage girls: No money for “gowns, clothes, shoes, prom, sports, anything really,” she said in an interview about her foster care experiences.
My heart goes out to Ms King, she made a mistake. We all made mistakes when we were 18, that’s what teenagers do. Unfortunately for Ms King, her mistake will temporally derail the path she was on to turn her life around.
I raise a teenage boy and a teenage girl and I have witnessed how difficult it can be for my kids to get through this time in their lives with the full support of having parents, a family and the financial backing that most kids have.
I couldn’t imagine how Melissa King dealt with being a teenager alone in the world without the support and the love of a family. We just hope Ms King can bounce back from this and that she doesn’t regress back into a state of anxiety and depression that had plagued her in the past.
Melissa King needs to know that we all make mistakes, but what defines you is how you recover from them.
To read more about the story, check out [TheSlate]