Carrie Prejean: sex tape was ‘my biggest mistake’

The disgraced former beauty queen Carrie Prejean chose the conservative presenter Sean Hannity's Fox TV show for a public confession last night. She described the "solo sex tape" that emerged last week as "the biggest mistake" of her life. Luckily for the 22-year-old, it looks as though no website is willing to take the risk of posting it.

Prejean told Hannity she had made the video tape herself to send to a boyfriend when she was a teenager and never dreamt it would be seen again.

Telling the Fox TV man that "it's humiliating to be talking about this on national TV" she explained: "All by myself, I was sending a boyfriend at the time, who I loved and cared about, a video of me."

Referring to the boyfriend, who remains unnamed, she said: "When you're young, you think, 'This is the one'. Never did I think it would come and just slap me right in the face."

Prejean was in safe hands for her mea culpa: Hannity wrote the forward to her recently published memoir, Still Standing.

The existence of the tape was revealed at the weekend by the gossip site TMZ.com after lawyers for Miss California USA sprang it on Prejean last Friday. Thy used it to prove that she had broken the terms of her contract, which demands that contestants have not appeared in any nude videos or pictures that could bring bad PR to the pageant.

Lawyers present at the meeting said the lawsuit was dropped within seconds.

According to the US media, the tape has been hawked around for some months with a price tag of $10,000 but no site has deemed it publishable. TMZ said they had seen it and it was "too racy" to post, while Nik Richie of TheDirty.com confirmed that they had been offered the video too but weren't in the market for it.

"It was very graphic," Richie told E! News, "and our lawyers wouldn't let us put it on the site."