Before a group of contestants walked out of a Miss Universe 2025 event in protest earlier this month, few people outside the pageant world knew the name Nawat Itsaragrisil.
It was November 4, the very first day of the 74th annual Miss Universe competition, which was being hosted by Itsaragrisil, the director of Miss Thailand. In a moment captured on Miss Thailand’s official livestream, Itsaragrisil got into an argument with Miss Mexico, Fátima Bosch, over a sponsorship event and attempted to call security on her. Multiple contestants, as well as Miss Universe 2024 Victoria Theilvig, walked out of the room to show their support for Bosch.
Footage of the confrontation quickly went viral around the world, and Miss Universe president Raul Rocha announced he would restrict Itsaragrisil from attending the rest of the pageant, calling his treatment of Bosch a “serious abuse.”
Itsaragrisil apologized for the incident during a tearful press conference the following day. He has since appeared at multiple events for the pageant, which will crown a winner on November 21.
Some women who competed at Miss Grand International — the pageant Itsaragrisil founded and continues to run, in addition to his duties at Miss Universe — told Business Insider they weren’t surprised by the video. This wasn’t the first time that “Papa Nawat,” as he’s widely known in the pageant world, had run into issues with beauty queens.
“It didn’t even remotely shock me,” said Rachel Slawson, a Miss Grand International 2023 contestant and former director of Miss Grand USA, which is an offshoot of the international pageant. “When people prioritize profits, women start to become dehumanized. They’re treated as a commodity, and their experiences and their feelings just don’t matter.”
Itsaragrisil and the Miss Universe Organization did not respond to requests for comment.
Who is ‘Papa Nawat’?
Itsaragrisil is the president of Miss Grand International, which has become one of the top international pageants since its launch in 2013.
“In my eyes, as a pageant girl, Miss Grand is one of the most popular and prestigious pageants in the world,” Heather Marie Thompson, who has competed at Miss Grand International, Miss New York USA, and Miss Supranational USA, told Business Insider.
Itsaragrisil built the Miss Grand International competition around what he calls the “4B Framework”: beauty, body, brains, and business. The pageant’s official website says this “holistic approach” helps shape women into “global ambassadors of strength, purpose, and influence.” The 2025 competition had contestants from 77 countries and was streamed on the GrandTV YouTube channel, which has over 2 million subscribers.
In February, the Miss Universe Organization announced that Itsaragrisil had been named the new national director of Miss Thailand.
Miss Universe operates like a franchise, selling licenses for the countries that compete in the pageant. A letter Itsaragrisil sent to Thailand’s stock exchange director in February says he paid 180 million baht, or about $5 million, to run the Miss Thailand pageant for the next five years with an option to extend.
Weeks after Itsagrarisil’s new role was announced, the organization revealed he will also be hosting the 74th annual Miss Universe pageant in Thailand.
Some pageant fans were surprised that Itsaragrisil had joined forces with Miss Universe while he was still running Miss Grand International, and others were excited to see him come on board. Although Miss Grand is structured almost identically to Miss Universe — with swimsuit, evening gown, and interview rounds, as well as a national costume competition — it’s earned a reputation for being more glitzy, glamorous, and “over the top,” Thompson said.
“Miss Grand is more of a show. It’s more about being an entertainer,” she told Business Insider. “Miss Universe for these past five years has become a bit stagnant. I thought bringing Nawat in would have been a good business idea because he’s grown a pageant from nothing. Miss Universe needed to bring that sparkle back.”
Controversy would soon follow.
A queen resigns
In May, Rachel Gupta resigned her title as Miss Grand International 2024. She was the first woman from India to take the crown in the pageant’s 12-year history, winning in October 2024, months after Noelia Voigt became the first Miss USA to step down in her pageant’s 70-plus-year history.
In a 56-minute YouTube video titled “The Truth about Miss Grand International” and posted on May 28, Gupta said her time as the reigning queen had been “the worst few months of my life.”
“I have been at rock bottom,” she said. “Miss Grand International Organization does not care about you. It does not care about its queens.”
Gupta said the organization was “hounding me constantly, just talking about my weight and my body all the time.”
“I remember one time, they sent their representative to me, and he just comes up to me and starts pinching me in different places,” Gupta tearfully recalled. “And he’s like, ‘Oh, you need to lose weight here. You need to lose weight here.’ It’s so embarrassing, and it makes you feel so small and so bad.”
Gupta directly called out Itsaragrisil and Teresa Chaivisut, Miss Grand International’s COO, in the video, saying they were “cold-hearted businesspeople.” She recalled sitting with the pair at a Miss Grand International event shortly after winning and said she was shocked to hear how they spoke about the women who were performing onstage.
“The kind of derogatory body-shaming, disgusting, deplorable comments they make, saying like, ‘Oh, she’s all right, but her knees are too fat. She’ll never win because of her knees.’ Every aspect of the body is pointed out for every girl,” Gupta said.
Chaivisut denied Gupta’s allegations during a TikTok Live on May 31, holding a Bible as she said, “I don’t criticize my queen at all, I swear to God.”
The same day that Gupta’s YouTube video was released, Itsaragrisil posted a video — which was subsequently reshared by pageant blogs — claiming that the pageant queen had been fired by Miss Grand International.
“You were not quality enough. You were never beautiful from the inside,” he said in the clip.
Itsaragrisil also responded via his Instagram stories, posting what he said were “before” and “after” pictures as he alleged that Gupta had undergone breast augmentation surgery. He added that she denied having the procedure. He also posted pictures of what he said were images of Gupta’s mother and sister receiving “free plastic surgery.”
While discussing Gupta during a press conference in June, Itsaragrisil told reporters that the pageant queen had “smelly armpits.”
Gupta held a press conference that same month, telling reporters that Itsaragrisil’s Instagram posts about her body were sexual harassment. She said he had been treating her publicly as he had treated her privately when she was Miss Grand International.
After the video of Itsaragrisil’s confrontation with Bosch at Miss Universe went viral, Gupta wrote on her Instagram story on November 4: “If this can be said in a room of 100 people, imagine what he said behind closed doors.”
Gupta and representatives for the Miss Grand International competition did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
A history of shaming contestants
While Gupta and Itsaragrisil’s fallout occurred after he joined the Miss Universe family, there have been past instances where he has gotten into trouble for discussing contestants’ bodies.
In October 2016, Miss Grand Iceland Arna Ýr Jónsdóttir dropped out of the Miss Grand International competition after she said staff told her to lose weight before the finals because “I have too much fat on me,” CNN reported.
Following her resignation, Itsaragrisil released a statement saying that Jónsdóttir had asked the pageant’s staff about her weight, and they told her she was “maybe a little bit fat.”
“This is a normal process for the three weeks during the pageant; everyone should show their improvement,” Itsaragrisil added.
Itsaragrisil also came under fire in October 2022 after he said in an online video that Miss Grand Vietnam Doan Thien An did not make it past the top 20 of that year’s Miss Grand International pageant because her body was not proportionate, according to the Vietnamese newspaper VN Express.
Jónsdóttir and An did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Thompson, who represented the US Virgin Islands at Miss Grand International the following year, told Business Insider that she had been aware of Itsaragrisil’s past comments when she competed, but didn’t hesitate to participate at the time.
“I went into competing at Miss Grand International with my eyes wide open,” she said. “I was in a mindset where I believed that if I just worked hard enough, I could avoid ever being put in a position to be body-shamed myself.”
“Looking back, I can see how naive that was. It made me realize that the problem was never about how ‘perfect’ I was; it was the culture itself,” she added. “And honestly, what I learned from that experience is exactly why I’ve been hesitant to step back onstage.”
Slawson told Business Insider she didn’t interact with Itsaragrisil much when she was the director of Miss Grand USA, but she heard investors of the pageant repeatedly criticize the contestants’ appearance and weight.
“A business partner told one of our sponsors, ‘Bear with us. These girls are all dumb,'” Slawson recalled. “I was really disappointed with the commentary the investors of the pageant were making about women behind closed doors. I had to correct them multiple times.”
After a year at Miss Grand USA, Slawson decided she couldn’t continue working in the pageant world.
“It just became very clear to me that this really wasn’t the right path forward to encourage women to empower themselves in their lives or their careers,” Slawson said. “So much of it is a smokescreen for people profiting off women as a commodity.”
“Once I really saw that so clearly, there was just not unseeing it — and no other choice but to walk away.”
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