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By Tanner O’Neal Riley
Tabitha Crain has given a 20-minute speech with 15 minutes’ notice.
She’s raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for survivors of domestic violence. She’s stood on stages in ball gowns and walked into Hulston Hall in sweatpants the next morning, and she’ll tell you — without blinking — that the two rooms aren’t as different as people think.
“I honestly feel like the closest thing to being a practicing attorney is being Miss Missouri,” she said. “And that probably sounds pretty ridiculous.”
It isn’t. It’s the whole story, actually.
This past June, Crain was crowned Miss Missouri in Mexico, Missouri on her third try at the title, after two previous years of coming up short. It’s the kind of detail that tells you most of what you need to know about her before she says another word: she doesn’t quit a room just because it didn’t go her way the first time.
No Contest
Some people agonize over where to go to law school. Tabitha Crain didn’t.
“There was really no contest for me,” she said.
She’d already given Mizzou four years of her life as an undergrad, and Mizzou had given her something back — academic scholarships that got her through nearly debt-free, a place that felt, in her words, like home before she even knew to call it that. So when it came time to choose a law school, she just came back — in part, she says, because of the Child and Family Justice Clinic, a chance to start doing the work she cared about before she’d even graduated.
Now a 2L, Crain is doing something most people in her position don’t even attempt: keeping her scholarships, staying part-time, and holding onto the crown, all at once. Her professors, she says, have made room for it. “All my professors are really supportive of everything that we’re doing.”
Fifteen Minutes’ Notice
Ask Crain where she learned to think like a lawyer, and she won’t point to a classroom first. She’ll point to a fundraiser for CASA.
She showed up expecting to sit in the audience. Instead, someone handed her a microphone and fifteen minutes to prepare a twenty-minute speech.
“That thinking-on-your-feet skill that professors talk so much about, that you gain in trial work that you don’t get until you get it, is what I’ve been doing every single day,” she said.
She’s had practice. Crain survived domestic violence during her freshman year of undergrad, an experience she doesn’t tuck away — she talks about it, she said, “all the time.” Mizzou stood by her through it. So did True North of Columbia, the domestic violence resource organization where she’d later take a professional role, and where the seed of everything she’s building now was planted.
For her capstone, Crain wrote a children’s book, Sally Says No Thank You, teaching bodily autonomy in language young readers can actually hold onto. And separately, she turned her own story into something visual — an art project where she wrote the things that had been said to her, and about her, directly onto her skin in Sharpie, then photographed it, then washed it off. The photos included statistics on domestic violence, words from her past, even an apology note once left on her back. She’s carried the exhibit across the Midwest, and it’s raised roughly half a million dollars for survivors.
Watching phrases like “boys will be boys” circle the drain, she’s said, was its own kind of ending.
By the time she took a gap year at a family law firm before law school, the direction was already set: family law, with a focus on divorce and adoption, built around one throughline — advocacy for the people who need it most.
The Dream Gap
Crain doesn’t dress up where she comes from.
“I grew up with literally nothing,” she said. She remembers, as a kid, asking her mom for a $3.50 slice of pizza and being told that would leave them $3.50 short on the mortgage that month.
Scholarships closed that gap — first at Mizzou, then again through nearly $25,000 in Miss America opportunities. And she’s clear about what that meant, beyond the number itself:
“That additionally kind of closed that dream gap and got me into rooms where you know, when you grow up like that, you feel like you don’t belong in those spaces. But it’s put me in those spaces so frequently that I do kind of feel like I belong now, and I feel a lot more comfortable in those spaces, and finances haven’t been a burden anymore because of Mizzou and Miss America.”
Building the Room for the Next Girl
Crain isn’t waiting until she’s an established attorney to start thinking about who comes next.
Her plan: a college resource center modeled on the RSVP Center at Missouri State and, eventually, a push to make something like it standard on college campuses everywhere, so no student has to go looking for support the way she once did.
“There’s a whole career path outside of being Miss Missouri,” she said. This is what she means by it.
The Elle Woods of It All
Crain has heard the comparison enough times to see it coming from across the room: put a pageant sash next to a law degree, and somebody’s going to bring up Elle Woods. She doesn’t fight it.
“I like the movie Legally Blonde,” she said. “It does ring a lot of truth” particularly the part where nobody expects the woman in the gown to also be the sharpest one in the room. Where Elle Woods walked into Harvard Law and had to prove, case by case, that a manicure and a mind aren’t mutually exclusive, Crain’s been doing her own version of that proof at Mizzou — minus the Chihuahua, plus a genuine reason for the spotlight.
“You know I’m just as smart in a full-length beaded dress as I am in sweatpants in Hulston Hall.”
What She Wants Remembered
Most people who win the crown put their lives on pause for it. Crain refused to.
“I felt like you can do both with good time management skills,” she said. “I hope that’s something that’s remembered — that there are no limits to what you can achieve if you want it bad enough.”
And if someone only ever knew her as Miss Missouri — never the scholarships, never the book, never the photographs, never the plans for what comes after? She’d want them to know, first, that there’s a whole career waiting on the other side of the sash. Second, that the crown didn’t come from privilege — it came from nothing, and from every scholarship that filled the space where privilege would’ve been. And third, the part she never hides: that she survived something, and she’s spent every day turning it into something else. Something that others who grew up just like her will see and think to themselves, “I can do it.”
You can watch Tabitha represent Missouri on the national stage when Miss America crowns its winner on September 6, 2026, in West Palm Beach, Florida. The competition streams internationally; check missamerica.org closer to the date for viewing details.
