Élodie Gossuin
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Élodie Gossuin (born December 15, 1980 in Reims, Marne, France) is a former beauty pageant winner and municipal politician.
Gossuin was raised in Trosly-Breuil in the Oise département, a village about seven miles east of the city of Compiègne. In her teens, she won several local beauty contests. While training to be a nurse, she won the "Miss Picardie" beauty contest in November of 2000 that qualified her to compete for the Miss France 2001 title. She won that contest and as a result received considerable press coverage.
Scheduled to represent her country in the May 2001 "Miss Universe" contest in San Juan, Puerto Rico, just days after winning the Miss France crown Gossuin became the victim of a malicious rumor posted on January 8, 2001 on a French language internet website that claimed the 20-year-old Gossuin was in fact a 27-year-old male transvestite named Nicolas Levanneur. Although the story provided no proof, it evolved to state that she might be a post-operative transsexual. While she at first dismissed it as nonsense, the news article made its way to other websites around the world and Gossuin became the butt of numerous jokes, cartoons, and wildly enhanced fabrications to the original story. The report was picked up by the major media and although careful to word it as an allegation, it nevertheless gave a degree of legitimacy to the totally unfounded rumor. Pressured to prove she was a woman, Gossuin's parents made her birth certificate public as well as releasing numerous photos of her as a child and a teen.
Élodie Gossuin's nightmare was allowed to continue for months until a few days before the Miss Universe contest when Frederic Royer, editor of the website that published the original article, stated publicly that the story had been a complete fabrication. Royer told the press that "As soon as something is placed on an internet site, people take it at face value, without asking themselves any questions." While the admission by the internet editor that the story was false, like others victimized by the wanton disregard of facts such as Eileen Davidson, Gossuin's story continued to be repeated by some.
At the 2001 Miss Universe pageant, Gossuin was a top 10 semi-finalist.
In late 2001, in Beirut, Lebanon, she won the Miss Europe contest then began working as a model and doing publicity appearances. In 2004, Élodie Gossuin embarked on a political career. As a member of the Union for a Popular Movement party, she was elected to the Conseil Régional de Picardie (regional council) in her native Picardie region on March 28th. Shortly after her election victory, she appeared in the French reality TV show, La Ferme Célébrités.
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| Preceded by: Sonia Rolland |
Miss France 2001 |
Succeeded by: Sylvie Tellier |
| Preceded by: Yelena Rogozhina |
Miss Europe 2001 |
Succeeded by: Svetlana Korolyeva |
