The following article by Ronan Farrow was posted on the New Yorker website February 16, 2018:
One woman’s account of clandestine meetings, financial transactions, and legal pacts designed to hide an extramarital affair.
At right, from the top, David Pecker, the chairman of American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer; Karen McDougal, a former Playmate of the Year; Donald Trump; and Dylan Howard, A.M.I.’s chief content officer.Illustration by Oliver Munday; Source Photographs: Jesse Grant / WireImage / Getty (McDougal); Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker (Pecker); Jamie Squire / Getty (Trump); Lucas Jackson / Reuters (Howard)
In June, 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of his reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” at the Playboy Mansion, in Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s publisher, threw a pool party for the show’s contestants with dozens of current and former Playmates, including Karen McDougal, a slim brunette who had been named Playmate of the Year, eight years earlier. In 2001, the magazine’s readers voted her runner-up for “Playmate of the ’90s,” behind Pamela Anderson. At the time of the party, Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me – telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you – I think you could be his next wife.’
Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own. Continue reading “Donald Trump, a Playboy Model and a System for Concealing Infidelity”
