The Miss Universe debacle just won't go away.

After the initial round of complaints and jokes over Steve Harvey's naming — and un-naming — of the incorrect winner of the Miss Universe pageant, "The conspiracy theories began," as Nia Temple Sanchez, Miss USA of 2014 puts it.

Sanchez, who was 1st Runner Up in the Miss Universe 2014 competition, was in the hall earlier this month when Harvey announced that Miss Colombia, Ariadna Gutierrez, was the new Miss Universe — then announced that he'd gotten it wrong and that Miss Philippines, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, was in fact the rightful winner. "The whole crowd erupted," she recalls. "There was shock, there was rejoicing, there was booing — the Colombians were booing."

It wasn't long before gossip had it that this was all a publicity stunt to raise the profile of the Miss Universe competition.

Sanchez isn't buying it. "The judges have too much integrity to do that; I know them," the 25-year-old beauty says. "They would never be involved in something like that. And the response in the bull pen when he announced Miss Colombia — I heard that people were jumping up shouting 'That's wrong!' 'Change it!' 'Fix it now!'"

Sanchez notes that the layout of Harvey's announcement card, widely seen on the Internet, was not all it should have been. "The Miss Philippines win should have been in bold capitals in a giant font size. Even so, I don't know how he got it wrong," she says.

As for Donald Trump's claim that it would never have happened if he still owned the pageant, Sanchez just says, "You really couldn't tell any difference behind the scenes. [New owners] WME/IMG said they wouldn't make any changes until after this year's pageant.

"I did like that the fans were involved this time and could vote," she adds. "Of course they crashed the website."

Sanchez tells us that now the pageant scuttlebutt is over whether Gutierrez will sue for emotional distress. Her sympathies are certainly with the runner up. "I cried for Miss Colombia — to have her life dreams ripped off her head that way was terrible."

For Sanchez, life post-Miss USA is pretty wonderful. She recently wed actor Daniel Booko ("The Christmas Gift") and spent Christmas in Michigan with his family. She and pageant pal and former Miss Australia Teagen Martin have launched Universal Confidence — a motivational speaking and workshop program dedicated to empowering women to believe in themselves and achieve their dreams — and they've been doing speaking engagements in various locales.

They were, in fact, doing a workshop in Las Vegas earlier this month timed to the pageant. "We had a big age range — 14 to 54," she says. "It was great."

The pageant was great too, she says, up to a point. "Steve Harvey was so funny and it was all so good until that last moment."

Photo credit: Steven Depolo