After performing at the MLB All-Star Game, Cassie Donegan was met with cruel comments about her appearance. The reigning Miss America speaks out about the ripple effect of body-shaming.
By: Taryn Ryder, Cassie Donegan
YAHOO LIFE
July 20, 2026
Cassie Donegan had dreamed of becoming Miss America since she first joined the organization’s Little Sisters program at age 9. After being crowned last September, singing “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch at last week’s 2026 MLB All-Star Game felt like another dream realized.
Her father, a disabled veteran, watched from the stands as Donegan performed for a packed ballpark. But within an hour, what should have been a career highlight had become something else entirely: Thousands of strangers were dissecting the 28-year-old’s face, body and health across social media.
Donegan decided to speak out — not only because of how the comments affected her, but because of the message they sent to every woman and girl reading them.
In an interview with Yahoo’s Taryn Ryder, Donegan reflects on the cruelty she encountered, the women who rallied around her and why she refuses to let the internet rewrite one of the proudest moments of her life.
Holding a public title may make my work public, but it does not make my humanity public property.
I understand that being Miss America comes with visibility. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone has the right to one. But I think we sometimes confuse someone choosing to do public-facing work with permission to replace opinion with cruelty or bullying. That’s never acceptable.
Sometimes, inside thoughts are inside thoughts for a reason.
Within an hour of the MLB All-Star Game ending, comments were appearing across nearly every social media platform. They had nothing to do with my performance or my singing and everything to do with my appearance.
It continued to multiply. Within 24 hours, people were literally telling me that I should end my life to put the general public out of its misery of having to look at me.
Never in my life did I imagine that people seeing 10 seconds of me in a roughly 50-second video would result in that.
It was shocking to realize that multiple people thought it was OK to say something like that about another person for any reason. It was overwhelming. You expect public perception and understand that things will be said about you, but no one fully prepares you to open your phone and see thousands of strangers debating your face, your body, your health and your identity.
Suddenly, I was watching people who had never met me speak about me with absolute certainty and make statements they claimed were facts.
It was a lot to process. It still is. The commentary hasn’t stopped, unfortunately. I don’t know whether there’s really a point at which you can process it all. When it comes in such abundance, it feels almost impossible.
It’s not that I’m actively seeking out the comments. With how widespread this has become, they’re almost impossible to avoid.
What makes it especially difficult is that singing “God Bless America” at the All-Star Game had been such an extraordinary moment for me.
I looked out at a completely packed ballpark. I couldn’t hear the crowd from the field, but when I watched videos afterward, I could hear people singing along with me. As both an artist and Miss America, it felt like the culmination of so much work. I was grinning from ear to ear. I couldn’t help but smile.
I also come from a long line of military service. My dad, a disabled veteran, was there and able to experience it with me.
When I hear the words to “God Bless America,” I think about my dad. I think about every member of my family who has served and every service member who has dedicated their life to giving us the ability to attend a baseball game on a weeknight and enjoy America’s pastime.
There are active duty service members overseas right now, making sure we can continue to have that freedom back home. For me, this was so much more than getting to sing at a game. It was really freaking cool.
Then, very shortly afterward, I realized the online spiral had begun.
I knew that holding a public title would expose me to scrutiny. But I think resilience is often misunderstood. Resilience doesn’t mean that nothing ever hurts you. It means deciding that what hurts you will not determine who you are, who you become, how you respond or how you treat other people.
Confidence is misunderstood too. We confuse it with being a character trait when it’s really a learned skill. It may come more easily to some people than others, but we all have to practice it. We all have days when we don’t feel confident.
Even as Miss America, I sometimes have to remind myself that I am here for a reason. That reason is backed up by the work I put in to get here. I’m not here by accident, and I don’t have to prove my place in any space.
I try to be honest about the days when I’m not feeling as confident because I want people to see the whole human in this position. People in roles like mine aren’t inherently confident all the time. We aren’t always feeling great or feeling our best. We’re human beings.
That is why the response to what happened became less about how the words were affecting me and more about the domino effect I could see them having on other people — particularly young women and little girls who were seeing and digesting this content.
When a woman’s appearance becomes the subject of public ridicule, every woman and girl reading it receives a message about how the world might someday speak about her. She is being taught that she may have to quantify her worth according to someone else’s opinion.
There is no single way for a woman to look. Femininity should never be a test someone has to pass before she is treated with dignity or the bare minimum of respectful language.
That’s why I chose to address what was happening head-on in a statement on Instagram, in the kindest and most gracious way I could. This is not acceptable. We cannot behave this way. The world deserves better than us choosing this kind of behavior.
In the middle of the cruelty, I also witnessed an extraordinary amount of kindness.
Numerous former Miss Americas — we call them our “forevers” — reached out and flooded me with love and support. They made sure I was OK and reminded me I wasn’t alone in this experience. This wasn’t something isolated to one Miss America; it is an unfortunate reality of being in the public eye.
It’s a time capsule kind of experience that only 97 other women in history have lived with me. The fact that so many of them stopped what they were doing to support me, both privately and publicly, meant a lot. The women I competed with, from the local and state levels through Miss America, rallied around me too. So did the incoming class competing for my title.
The support was almost just as overwhelming, but in a good way. It reminded me that light will always shine brighter.
To the people choosing to leave hateful comments: I don’t need an apology. I don’t need anyone to suddenly decide that they think I’m beautiful.
I would simply hope that the next time they have the opportunity to tear someone down, they make a different choice. I believe people are capable of reflection, growth and doing better. Sometimes doing better begins with realizing that our words carry much more weight than we intend.
If even one person comes away from this thinking, You know what? I probably shouldn’t comment like that again, then something good has come from this experience.
Most of all, I never want a young girl to look at what happened to me and conclude that she needs to change herself — to become more conventionally acceptable — before she is worthy of pursuing something extraordinary.
Her worth and value will never be found in the opinions or cruelty of others. She is already more than capable of achieving it.
Read the article HERE: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/article/im-miss-america-that-doesnt-mean-comments-about-my-body-dont-hurt-200153429.html