Steve Harvey's Miss Universe 2015 Gaffe

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About

Steve Harvey's Miss Universe 2015 Gaffe refers to the mix-up of the announcement of the winning contestant by American comedian and host Steve Harvey at the 64th annual Miss Universe pageant ceremony in December 2015.

Origin

On December 20th, 2015, the 64th annual Miss Universe pageant was held at the AXIS Theater in Las Vegas, Nevada, hosted by American comedian and TV host Steve Harvey. As the announcement of the final results approached towards the end of the nationally televised event, Harvey erroneously named the first runner-up, Ariadna Gutiérrez (Miss Colombia), as the winner of the pageant. However, a few minutes after Gutiérrez was crowned, Harvey returned to the stage to reveal that he had read the results incorrectly and named Pia Wurtzbach (Miss Philippines) as the winner of the pageant (shown below).

As the confused audience began jeering at Harvey's announcement mix-up, the host immediately claimed full responsibility for his mistakes and displayed the content of the card on-screen to clear any doubts over the winner of the pageant.

Spread

Online Reaction

Within minutes of Steve Harvey's apology and re-crowning of Pia Wurtzbach as the winner of Miss Universe 2015, Twitter blew up with a storm of tweets expressing a wide range of emotions in reaction to Harvey's gaffe, with the hashtag #MissUniver2015 instantly rising to the top of the worldwide trending topics list.

Harvey's Response

After the show, Harvey issued an apology to both contests who were involved in his gaffe via Twitter, albeit not without making additional mistakes in spelling their countries, the Philippines and Colombia (shown below). The tweet has been since removed from Harvey's account. The TV host also followed up on his Facebook page with a similar apology (shown below, right), which garnered more than 576,700 likes, 96,800 shares and 57,000 comments in less than 24 hours.

In addition, Harvey approached Wurtzbach outside the venue to personally apologize to her, which was recorded on mobile camera and uploaded to Instagram by ABS-CBN News reporter Dyan Castillejo (shown below).