The voice teacher opens up to PEOPLE about the criticism she received about her appearance after singing at a recent baseball game
By Cara Lynn Shultz
PEOPLE
July 24, 2026
Miss America Cassie Donegan was excited to perform “God Bless America” at the MLB All-Star Game in Philadelphia on July 14.
“Getting to do that as Miss America, at America’s pastime, during the 250th [anniversary], singing a song that’s honoring our nation, I was nothing but excited,” Donegan, 28, tells PEOPLE. “It was even more special having my dad, a 100% disabled veteran there, getting to experience it with me.”
But an hour after her performance, comments about her appearance accompanied by clips of her singing started popping up online. People criticized her weight, her makeup, her age. Some even questioned her gender.
“I never in my life thought a 10-second clip would lead to so many people in comments and in my DMs telling me that I should do the world a service by ending my own life so no one has to look at me,” she tells PEOPLE. “That’s pretty extreme.”
Donegan, who has been making public appearances since she was crowned Miss America nearly a year ago, says she doesn’t know what elicited the negativity on that day.
“I have no idea. I wish I could pinpoint something. But I don’t know, genuinely,” she said. “I’ve had the honor and the privilege of getting to sing in some pretty incredible places with audiences that were just as large and did not garner this much negativity.”
At first, she tells PEOPLE, she ignored it — until Donegan began to see the impact on her students.
“I had one of my younger students even debate if she wanted to continue training,” she said of a 13-year-old student, who had been considering a career in musical theater. Since her teacher was “being destroyed like this on the internet,” she asked Donegan, “‘What are they gonna do to me?’ “
“That’s when I knew I had a responsibility to say something; it was well beyond affecting just me,” Donegan says.
She addressed the backlash in a July 15 post on Instagram, mentioning the “most hateful and malicious content.”
“Somewhere, a little girl is watching the way we speak about women,” Donegan wrote, “and learning how she is supposed to view herself.”
As she tells PEOPLE, “I never want a young girl or a woman — or anyone, really — to look at what took place on those posts and conclude that she needs to change herself in any way or be more conventionally or societally acceptable before she’s worthy of pursuing something that she wants to pursue.”
“When a woman’s appearance becomes the subject of public ridicule, the woman being discussed is not the only person absorbing those words. Every woman and girl is absorbing that message.”
“I never want them to confuse where their worth is found, and that’s why I said something because we don’t need strangers telling us we are or not beautiful,” Donegan says. “We need young women to hear that their worth was never [for] strangers to determine in the first place.”
Two days after her performance at the game, Donegan spoke at the leadership conference for Best Buddies, a nonprofit that advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She said she had a lot of anxiety around the appearance and was concerned about her presence bringing negative attention to the event. She didn’t want to anyone disparaging the attendees. While they did get some “terrible comments,” she says, “Thankfully, there’s a delete button.”
Donegan explains why she finally spoke up for herself. “I didn’t say anything because I need an apology,” she says. “I don’t, and I also don’t need anyone to decide suddenly that they think I am beautiful or talented or whatever it may be.”
But, she tells PEOPLE, “I would just hope that the next time they have the opportunity to tear someone down, they make a different choice.”
Read the article HERE: https://people.com/miss-america-cassie-donegan-bullied-online-exclusive-12025265