Jamie: How many kids in the family?
Vanessa: Me and my brother.
Jamie: What's he doing?
Vanessa: He's an actor. He was here yesterday and he might swing by today. He was just on "Martin," maybe three weeks ago, and he's done "Cybill." He did a show called "Buddies." He did "The American Girl."
Jamie: What's his name?
Vanessa: Christopher Williams.
Jamie: Is he older? Younger?
Vanessa: He's four years younger. He's 28. He's got like dark blue eyes and kind of a goatee and we look like brother and sister, yeah.
Jamie: Let me ask you something. Early on, people say you thought that you were a white girl. You didn't relate to black people at all. I think you had a white boyfriend at the time.
Vanessa: When I was Miss America? Uh huh.
Jamie: And did you ever feel like you were white?
Vanessa: Well, I've never felt that I was white. And I don't think anybody as a black person will ever feel that they're white, no matter how light their skin or how straight they get their hair You know, how light their eyes are. I certainly have had the experience of being discriminated against, and I know what it's like not to be in the mainstream.
Jamie: Give me an example of that.
Vanessa: Well, winning Miss America and having people hate me because I was black. Having the KKK want to kill me and kill my family because I was not representative of America. And I had to deal with that at 20 years old.
Jamie: What? You got threats and stuff?
Vanessa: Oh, yeah! I had death threats from the time I won [the Miss America pageant] through my whole year. I had an FBI box full of letters. People sent threatening letters. I mean, I had 24-hour armed guards outside for the appearances that I would do down South, in Alabama. You know, threatening my life.
Jamie: How did you handle that?
Vanessa: I was angry. I was defensive. And particularly since I never aspired to be Miss America, anyway, I certainly wanted to give up and say, "What's the use?" At that point I had white supremacists, or whatever, saying they hated me because I was black and black people saying they didn't accept me because I wasn't black enough. So it was like a no-win situation. There certainly was a time after the first month and a half or so that it was just, "What's the point? What is the point?" And then, after I regained my composure, I went along and did the job that I did.
Jamie: When you see people like Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson and O.J. with all the press against them, and you went through your fight [She fell from grace when the compromising photos she had done as a teenager were published.], how do you feel? Do you empathize with what is happening to them?
Vanessa: My stuff was never that big. I mean in the scheme of things my stuff was relatively a short period of time. And also, these people, Michael and O.J., had already established themselves. They were already their personas. When it all happened to me, I hadn't gotten a chance to sing, or dance, or act, or do my thing. So I had a little harder struggle because I had a lot of negative publicity as a celebrity and I did not get a chance to show people the artistic work that I knew that I could do, but I needed the opportunity to do. So these guys--Michael Jackson--everybody knew he was a great singer and artist. And O.J. Simpson--everybody knew that he was a great football player and trophy winner and all that stuff. So that makes us different in terms of when the scandal happened. But I just think theirs are much, much bigger things because they're much bigger celebrities.