During Monday night’s presidential debate, Hillary Clinton called out Donald Trump for his treatment of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, saying he called her “Miss Piggy” after she gained weight and “Miss Housekeeping” in reference to her Hispanic ancestry.
The media quickly and dutifully pedaled out Machado’s sob story as another example of Trump’s sexist behavior. The very next day Cosmopolitan rolled out an in-depth interview with the Venezuelan beauty queen detailing the horrors of Trump’s name calling — complete with a photo spread of Machado wearing an American flag draped around her shoulders.
Lucia Graves profiled Machado’s experience in The Guardian, and even compared her to the Khans — the Constitution-toting parents who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in July and whose son died during a deployment. And The New York Times ran a double-bylined piece entitled “Shamed and Angry: Alicia Machado, a Miss Universe Mocked by Donald Trump.” Nowhere in any of these “in-depth” pieces was there any mention of Machado’s very colorful past.
Here are four things the media isn’t tell you in these stories about Hillary Clinton’s new beauty queen best friend.
1. She Reportedly Had A Daughter With a Notorious Mexican Drug Lord
In 2010, the Mexican attorney general’s office said Machado was romantically involved and had a daughter with notorious drug lord, Jose Gerardo Alvarez Vazquez, also known as “El Indio.” The allegation came from a witness who testified the two were romantically linked, according to CNN.
This witness said El Indio and several other known drug-traffickers attended Machado’s daughter’s baptism in 2008. The witness — who went into protection soon after giving this testimony — was shot and killed at a cafe in Mexico City in 2009. Machado has since denied these reports, claiming her child’s father is a well-respected businessman.
2. She Reportedly Threatened to Kill a Judge
A Venezuelan judge said Machado threatened “to ruin my career as a judge and … kill me,” after he indicted her then-boyfriend for murder. In 1998, her boyfriend allegedly shot and killed the judge’s brother-in-law outside of the church where his sister’s funeral was being held. According to the Associated Press, some said Machado drove the getaway car, but she wasn’t charged because there wasn’t sufficient evidence, despite the fact no one corroborated her alibi that she was home sick at the time of the shooting.
When CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked her about these allegations, Machado didn’t exactly deny them.
“He can say whatever he wants to say,” she said. “I don’t care. You know, I have my past. Of course, everybody has. Everybody has a past. And I’m not a saint girl. But that is not the point now.”
3. She’s Really Bad at Geography
In 2010, Machado de-activated her Twitter account after she called North and South Korea “the Chinas.”
“Tonight I want to ask you to join me in a prayer for peace, that these attacks between the Chinas do not make our situation worse,” she tweeted.
The tweet spurred a lot of backlash, prompting her to delete her account.
“I now have a lot of psychopaths on the account and it’s best I start another one,” she said before signing off.
4. She Modeled For Playboy
She’s appeared in Playboy several times throughout her career in magazines that hit stands in both Mexico and the United States.
These details about Machado’s past raise questions, not just about the Clinton campaign, but the media’s eagerness to disseminate Hillary’s narrative. Why were so many media outlets so quick to take Clinton’s narrative and run with it without taking a second look at who Alicia Machado is? Why didn’t any of the aforementioned news outlets think these facts were worth asking the former beauty queen about when they sat down and talked? Why does a Clinton surrogate get these embarrassing and incriminating details of her past conveniently memory holed?
