While the exposure she got was not the type she wanted, she became a star on her own terms, as a Grammy-nominated singer and an actress with prominent roles in Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, among others. “She wanted the scholarship money ($25,000),” TIME explained, “and she wanted the exposure. A musical theater major at Syracuse University, she’d entered the pageant circuit for practical reasons. The title had never been a dream of hers, as TIME attested just after she won the competition. The statement that Williams ultimately made was that she was more than a racy photo spread - and more than Miss America. “If she wanted to make this kind of statement, that would be her business, but the statement wasn’t made by her.”
“The single victim in all of this was the young woman herself, whose right to make this decision was taken away from her,” TIME quoted Hefner as saying. Hugh Hefner emphasized the former rationale in explaining Playboy’s restraint, calling the publication of Williams’ nude photos “immoral” and “improper.” Playboy, meanwhile, took the moral high ground: it had been offered the photos first, but turned them down partly in deference to Williams - and partly because, per TIME, “it does not use what Spokesman Dave Salyers calls lesbian material.” The pageant’s organizers were aghast at the images, which appeared in Penthouse’s September 1984 issue with the headline, “Miss America: Oh, God, She’s Nude!” The magazine’s publisher had little compunction about printing them over Williams’ objections. TIME reported that the photographer was paid more than Penthouse had ever paid for a photo spread before. But they did leave the studio, partly because she was identifiable: photos of Miss America in compromising positions, some of them involving another nude woman, were worth their weight in gold.
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