02/16/2018
A former Playboy model who claims she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006 detailed for the New Yorker her experience with the future president and the system by which he and his friends kept his affairs quiet.
The model, Karen McDougal, described a legal agreement—one she willingly signed but claims she did not fully understand—that silenced her. She also spoke of the affair, which she said began just a few months after Trump’s son Barron was born, and recounted behavior similar to that of affairs he reportedly had with other women around the same time. The New Yorker report, by Ronan Farrow, cites dozens of pages of documents supporting her account.
McDougal met Trump in 2006 at a pool party at the Playboy Mansion, she said. A man described as her friend provided an eight-page letter she wrote, in which she described the affair that followed:
Trump and McDougal began talking frequently on the phone, and soon had what McDougal described as their first date: dinner in a private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. McDougal wrote that Trump impressed her. “I was so nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man,” she wrote. “We talked for a couple hours – then, it was “ON”! We got naked + had sex.” As McDougal was getting dressed to leave, Trump did something that surprised her. “He offered me money,” she wrote. “I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, ‘No thanks – I’m not ‘that girl.’ I slept w/you because I like you – NOT for money’ – He told me ‘you are special.’ ”
Afterward, McDougal wrote, she “went to see him every time he was in LA (which was a lot).” Trump, she said, always stayed in the same bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and ordered the same meal—steak and mashed potatoes—and never drank.
McDougal recalled that Trump would often send her articles about him or his daughter, as well as signed books and sun visors from his golf courses.
While McDougal said Trump made efforts to hide public evidence of their affair—his bodyguard would escort her to his hotel rooms; she would buy plane tickets herself and he would then reimburse her—he didn’t try to hide her from his family.
In November 2016, just before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer, paid $150,000 for rights to McDougal’s story. People who worked for the company told the New Yorker that the CEO and chairman of AMI, who was described as a personal friend of Trump’s, often bought stories to kill them, sometimes to protect the subject of the story and sometimes to hold the story as a sort of leverage over celebrities.
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