Queen Azalea Kira Kazantsev looks to 'nail' domestic violence

April 01--WILMINGTON -- As a child, Kira Kazantsev moved a lot. She spent a lot of time being the new girl, and got pretty good at making new friends.

When Kazantsev, 25, who was Miss America in 2015, is crowned the 70th queen of the North Carolina Azalea Festival on Wednesday -- that's Queen Azalea LXX, if you're counting by Roman numerals -- she'll be the new girl once again. But she's hoping to make fast friends with Wilmington, a town she'll be visiting for the first time.

"It's kind of exciting to be the 70th," Kazantsev said from Los Angeles, where she lives, during a phone interview. "When I was asked, I was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is that Azalea Festival where Heather French (Henry, Miss America 2000 and Azalea queen in 2011) and a bunch of my Miss America sisters have been.' So that was a no-brainer."

Over the phone, Kazantsev comes across as friendly -- with a quick sense of humor.

"I'm not afraid to laugh at myself," she said. "I can be awkward turtle all day long."

During the 2014 Miss America Pageant, Kazantsev said she got to be friends with Beth Stovall, a former University of North Carolina Wilmington student who was competing as Miss North Carolina to Kazantsev's Miss New York.

"She's just somebody that makes me want to be better at life," Kazantsev said, adding that Stovall filled her in on the particulars of Southern food, camaraderie and family.

"Even if I'm not from the South I want to be a part of all those traditions," she said. "My Miss America sisters joke that I'm a secret Southern girl, and I get to break that out in North Carolina."

From Russia, with love

One of Kazantsev's best opportunities to prove her Southern bona fides will be at Thursday's Airlie Luncheon Garden Party, the Azalea Festival event she said she's most looking forward to.

"That's, like, my activity of choice. If I get to wear a hat and walk around in a beautiful dress on a regular basis, that is what I would do," she said. "In this case I'll be wearing a crown, so I'm real excited to get to be able to do that."

Kazantsev will be accompanied by a very special guest at the garden party -- her mother. "It will be nice to get to spend an event like this with her," she said. "My mom has not spent a lot of time in the South, so for her to get to see this and be part of it, she's thrilled."

Kazantsev's parents are Russian immigrants -- her father's a surgeon -- and she speaks three languages (English, Russian and Spanish). She said that when she was around 11, pageants started as "something fun that me and my mom would do together. We would scour eBay for my wardrobe or my mom would make my costumes. It was a very low-budget operation."

She also did musical theater as a child, and traveled with a young performers' company in Northern California doing revues of show tunes. In high school, though, singing took a back seat to cheerleading and golf, a sport she's become very passionate about and pretty good at. She was was named one of the most beautiful women in golf by Golf.com.

Even after Kazantsev went to college at Hofstra University on Long Island in New York, she was more focused on getting into law school than singing. But when she decided to make a run for the Miss New York title, partly as a way to earn scholarship money, she decided to make singing her pageant talent -- albeit with her own quirky twist.

During the Miss America competition in 2014, Kazantsev used her strong voice to sing Pharrell Williams' hit "Happy" while sitting crossed-legged on the stage and tapping out rhythms with a red cup named Wilson, an idea she took from the film "Pitch Perfect." Twitter exploded in mockery -- a mode it seems Twitter is perpetually in -- but the judges were clearly charmed, something Kazantsev said she had in mind all along.

She said she wanted to show the judges that "I can get down on the ground in a really nice outfit and full hair and makeup with kids and and play the cups at all of these children's hospitals I'm going to visit. And I'm going to be awesome with them."

If the performance with the red cup got the judges' (and Twitter's) attention, however, it was her on-point answer to an interview question posed to Kazantsev about her platform of protecting women from domestic violence that probably sealed her win. Not only was the topic timely -- the Ray Rice scandal was in the headlines at the time -- but her answer forcefully accused "the justice system (of) driving the getaway car for abusers."

As it turns out, Kazantsev knows what she's talking about. She was in an abusive relationship in college and told National Public Radio that it made her feel helpless.

"At first I was a little scared to do it. I was scared to talk about myself and my experiences and to identify myself as having dealt with that," she said. "When I became Miss America, I believe -- right time, right place -- I needed to be there in that moment to talk about the issue because it was all of a sudden in the spotlight."

She continues to call attention to the problem of domestic violence with a campaign called #PutTheNailInIt, for which she and others paint their left ring fingers a shade of dark purple.

"It's a conversation starter," she said. "I can't tell you how many times people will try to be facetious and say, 'Oh my gosh, why do you have this accent nail?' And I'll say, 'Thank you for asking. Did you know one in four women and one in seven men are affected by domestic violence?'"

A low moment

Kazantsev's euphoria after winning Miss America was short-lived. A week after she was crowned in September of 2014, Jezebel.com, citing an unnamed source, reported that Kazantsev had been kicked out of her sorority, Alpha Phi, for violating the sorority's policy against hazing. Jezebel reported that, under Kazantsev's supervision, pledges "were called names, berated for their perceived physical flaws and imperfections and made to perform physical tasks to the point of bruising and exhaustion."

Kazantsev denied the allegations and said she was kicked out of Alpha Phi not for hazing, but for an email in which she made what she now calls a bad joke about creating a "scary" evening for pledges. She received full support from the Miss America organization after the story came out.

Kazantsev also told Lara Spencer during a tense appearance on "Good Morning America" that "under the broad definition of hazing, yes, I was involved with some of those activities while I was at Hofstra," and said she merely treated pledges how she herself had been treated as a freshman.

Talking about those events two and half years later, it's clear the stress hasn't fully dissipated.

"It kind of all happened at a time when I was supposed to be celebrating, and so excited about what had happened in my life. And then it was brought down by people that were writing lies and that were writing letters to bring me down," Kazantsev said. "The higher you rise, the more people want to bring you down. Girls can be very mean to one another and people can be very jealous. Not to say that I haven't made my own mistakes in life. Of course I have. I've done that. But I have learned that you can rise above. You can take the high road and continue to do great work no matter what."

Kazantsev likened the allegations to cyber bullying, something she's "dealt with a huge amount of," she said, "social media nastiness and that whole world of people."

"The minute you crumble and you try to engage the crazy, that's it. You just can't do that. I have to know that my dreams, and the goals that I have and the good works that I've done, have not gone unnoticed and that I am a good girl and a good person who's out there fighting for everything I believe in. And I will never stop doing that, no matter what some person on social media or some anonymous source has to say."

Moving on

Kazantsev said her dreams and goals have changed pretty drastically since the days when was interning for U.S.New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and thinking that law school was her destiny. These days, she serves as director of community engagement for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, managing their Miss America content creation and marketing and working with titleholders and events around the country to raise money for the hospital.

"It's one of the best things I got out of my year" as Miss America, she said, and it's a flexible job that allows her to travel and freelance as a TV host and entertainment personality.

At the same time, it's been an adjustment going from being Miss America to being a former Miss America.

"You're at this super-high high," Kazantsev said. "And then in the blink of an eye you're not. You go back to being just Kira. It took me a little bit of time to assimilate to that and redefine the identity I had had."

What one might call a healthy self-doubt turns up in lightly self-deprecating comments or in blog posts where she talks about wanting to approve her appearance, but it's all part of what she hopes is a journey to self-awareness.

"Sometimes I sit down and I'm like, 'What am I doing with my life?" Kazantsev said. "And I definitely have those moments of, I'm letting the whole world down. But I also have to put that in perspective and look at the body of work I've accomplished as a 25-year-old. And I'm doing just fine. I just have to remind myself of that every once in a while."

Contact John Staton at 910-343-2343 or John.Staton@StarNewsOnline.com.

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