Mekyla Li held the Miss Grand USA crown for just seven days before the organization took it back. On August 19, the pageant announced it was terminating her reign and releasing her from the title and all associated duties, closing out one of the shortest runs in the competition’s ten-year public record.
The official statement said almost nothing. Li lost the title in a decision “made in accordance with contractual policies outlined by the Miss Grand USA organization.” The pageant never named the policy she was accused of breaking, and never mentioned the reason anyone actually cared about.
That reason was not hard to find. Li is facing two felony hit-and-run charges tied to a November 2024 crash in Los Angeles. She was arrested days after the wreck and later pleaded not guilty. A woman injured that night is also suing her.
The crash that followed her to Las Vegas
Li was arrested on November 24, 2024, in connection with the crash. Prosecutors hit her with two counts: a hit-and-run causing non-serious injury, and a hit-and-run causing permanent serious injury. At an arraignment in March 2025, she pleaded not guilty to both charges.
The criminal case is only half of her legal trouble. Court records obtained by People show Li is also a defendant in a civil lawsuit over the same night. A woman claims Li caused the crash, left her seriously hurt, and climbed into a rideshare without ever calling 911.
The complaint seeks damages for negligence, a hit-and-run, intoxicated driving, and reckless driving. Li is not the only name on it. Michael Scobey is listed as a defendant alongside her.
None of the charges have been proven. Li entered a not guilty plea but has not commented publicly on them, and her attorney has not responded to requests for comment. But an open felony matter is an open felony matter, and it was hanging over her the whole time she was competing in Vegas. She won a national title while two hit-and-run counts sat on a Los Angeles court docket with her name on them.
A second problem the pageant would not mention
Set the charges aside for a second, and Li still had a snag. Divorce records obtained by People show she was married from August 2018 to December 2019, and Miss Grand USA’s published criteria bar any candidate who has ever been married or pregnant. A marriage of about sixteen months that ended years ago still counts against you under those rules.
The pageant’s published criteria read strict on paper. Candidates “must have a clean personal record with no criminal history, scandalous background, or participation in adult content or activities deemed inappropriate by MGI.” Competitors also have to be aged 21 to 35 by the date of the Miss Grand International final and to have been born female.
An active felony case and a prior marriage would put Li on the wrong side of two separate requirements at once. The organization never laid that out in plain language. It leaned on the “contractual policies” line and let everyone connect the dots.
Seven days from cloud nine to nothing
Li was crowned in Las Vegas on August 12. She told an interviewer she was already thinking about the road ahead. Her plan was to hit the Miss Grand International stage in India later this year and show up, in her words, “in full force.”
On August 18, one day before the plug got pulled, she was still posting like nothing was wrong. “The crown is on, the lights are waiting, and I’m ready to make this year count and see just how grand this journey can be,” she wrote on Instagram. In the same post she called the win “surreal” and the night an “unforgettable night.” The very next day her title was gone.
The organization’s farewell had one more awkward wrinkle. In the same statement announcing her removal, it misspelled her first name, writing “Mekayla” instead of Mekyla. Then it asked that “all dialogue surrounding this transition remain respectful.”
That is a rough way to lose something. She spent a week celebrating on social media, told her followers the crown was on and the lights were waiting, and then watched the same lights get shut off. Seven days is barely long enough to get the sash dry-cleaned.
Who gets the crown now
The obvious answer is the first runner-up, Miss Grand Indiana, Victoria Oluwakotanmi. The organization has not formally confirmed a successor, so for the moment the national title is essentially sitting empty.
Whoever takes over gets more than a sash and a photo shoot. The Miss Grand USA winner represents the entire country at Miss Grand International, and that trip to India was supposed to be Li’s. It now falls to somebody else on short notice.
It is also unclear how much of the usual first-week momentum survives a scandal like this. The runner-up would inherit a title that just made headlines for all the wrong reasons, which is a strange starting line for any reign.
The bigger stage behind the title
Miss Grand USA was founded in 2016 by Chantel MartÃnez, who staged the first national pageant on May 28 that year in New York City. It feeds into Miss Grand International, one of the larger global beauty competitions, and the 2026 national pageant was held in Las Vegas.
The American side has one moment it likes to point to. Abena Appiah, a Ghanaian American model, won Miss Grand International 2020 at a final delayed to March 2021 in Bangkok, the first American to take the title and, by contemporaneous accounts, the first Black winner. That is the level the USA winner is sent to compete against, which is part of why eligibility gets checked so closely.
The organization has also changed hands recently. The franchise runs under Protagonist Live LLC, and on December 6, 2024, Crown Legacy LLC took over management of it. So the people handling this mess are a relatively new team steering an established brand.
Who Mekyla Li is
Before the national crown, Li had built a genuine pageant record. She was named Miss Asia USA in 2025, then Miss Grand Massachusetts 2026, and used that Massachusetts title to reach the national stage. This was not some newcomer who wandered in off the street.
Her own website describes her as a “psychology scholar” born to Chinese and South African parents and raised across three continents. Her biography says she is “recognized for her work at the intersection of global identity, representation, and impact,” the kind of polished language that fills a pageant program.
The gap between that biography and a two-count felony hit-and-run case is the whole story. A résumé built around representation and impact usually does not include an open criminal docket and a civil suit accusing you of leaving an injured woman on the road and taking a rideshare home.
What it comes down to
Li won a national title on August 12, celebrated it publicly through August 18, and had it revoked on August 19. The pageant blamed “contractual policies” and left it there. The paperwork tells the rest: two felony charges she is fighting, a lawsuit over the same crash, and a marriage that the rulebook says should have kept her out of the running to begin with.
She is entitled to her not-guilty plea, and the court will sort the charges out on its own timeline. The crown, though, is a private contract, and that decision has already been made. Seven days on, seven days off.
