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Miss New Jersey Comes Clean, Keeps Crown

Thu., Jul. 12, 2007 4:22 PM PDT by Natalie Finn

Amy Polumbo may have been out of her gourd a while back, but she's still in the running to be Miss America.

The reigning Miss New Jersey will get to keep her crown after going public with old pictures of her that were anonymously sent to pageant officials in a ploy to get Polumbo to relinquish her title, which she won only last month.

"I'm very happy about this decision and I look forward to resuming my agenda as Miss New Jersey," Polumbo said Thursday during a news conference. "I want to thank the public. I also want to thank God for getting me through this."

She also thanked the pageant board for its support and apologized for any trouble the incident had caused.

Polumbo announced last week that she was the target of a shady scheme but that the pictures a blackmailer—who called him or herself the Committee to Save Miss America—was threatening to publish were neither lewd nor explicit. She said that she had already posted the photos years before on her facebook.com page.

In an appearance on the Today show earlier this morning, the 22-year-old Wagner College student produced some of the supposedly scandalous shots.

"They're not that bad, but they were meant to be private and it makes me feel very vulnerable that the entire country has to see them now because of this situation," Polumbo told Today coanchor Matt Lauer. "I want to end this and…it's time to reveal them. Papers are starting to post more pictures that aren't even of me."

One showed Polumbo's boyfriend biting her fully clothed breast; another shows her dressed in jeans, posed in a spread eagle position, during a limo ride (a friend's birthday party, Polumbo said), while another featured the coed holding two small gourds in front of her chest—once again, while she was fully clothed.

"This was Halloween, long before I even imagined I would be a pageant contestant," Polumbo explained. "My friend was joking around that I was flat-chested, and I decided to be a goofball and be funny.

All of the pictures in which Polumbo is shown drinking were taken when after she had turned 21, she said.

"I think it's kind of ridiculous and not a publicity stunt whatsoever, and it's not only affecting my life and my family's life, but it's affecting the lives of the contestants and a lot of other people, and it's not fair to them," Polumbo told Lauer on Monday.

"Obviously, they're not that bad, I'm a normal college girl."