Amy Polumbo (Miss New Jersey) blackmailed over nude photos. Nude pictures scandal?

July 6, 2007

New Jersey - Amy Polumbo (Miss New Jersey) is being blackmailed over possible nude photos that she posted years ago on a private Internet site called Facebook.

Polumbo says she won't give in to an anonymous threat that personal photographs of her will be made public if she refuses to relinquish her crown.

"It would certainly be easier for me to simply succumb to these unlawful and immoral threats, and quietly disappear," Amy Polumbo said Thursday.

The anonymous threat came in the form of a letter sent with the photos to the 22-year-old Howell High School graduate, her family members and pageant officials, said her attorney, Anthony R. Caruso of Archer and Greiner in Princeton.

"Not now, not ever," was Polumbo's response at Thursday afternoon's news conference at Asbury Park's Paramount Theater. "In fact, I am more committed to ... uphold the title of Miss New Jersey in a manner to which it deserves."

Caruso, retained by the family shortly after they received the packages, said his firm is concentrating on identifying whoever is behind the threat, and that law enforcement authorities will be notified. He would not discuss exactly what the anonymous letter said.

Caruso said the photos show Polumbo with some friends and some of the images were from her private page on the Facebook social networking Web site.

"It was a murky photocopy of a photograph and there was absolutely no nudity," said Mark Soifer, Miss New Jersey spokesman and a member of the pageant's board of directors.

"I don't think the photos are that bad," said Caruso. "The people posting this blackmail scheme are trying to make these photos out to be worse than I think they are."

Caruso said he has contacted the Facebook site's attorneys for help in determining if the photos were illegally downloaded from the private page.

© AlaskaReport News