A former Playboy Playmate of the Year documented her alleged affair with the future President Trump in a handwritten journal and acknowledged selling off her story to a gossip media group that suppressed it.
Karen McDougal, a former model who says she has recently found God and regretted parts of her past, wrote in the journal that Trump introduced her to his family, showed her his wife’s separate bedroom in Trump Tower, and brought her to his private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel during the nine-month affair.
The journal was obtained by the New Yorker, and McDougal, 46, confirmed to the magazine that she’d written it.
But McDougal said she was limited about what else she could say because of a confidentiality agreement she’d signed with American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer.
She confirmed the company – which is run by Trump pal and supporter David Pecker – paid her $150,000 shortly before the 2016 election to clam up about any account of any affair she had with a “then-married man.”
That “then-married man” was the then-reality star of “The Apprentice,” who she said would fly her across the country to have sex at events including the Lake Tahoe golf tournament where he allegedly began an affair with pornstar Stormy Daniels.
Both relationships allegedly started shortly after Melania Trump gave birth to their son Barron.
The now-First Lady accompanied Trump on a trip to Florida on Friday, although they arrived for the trip on Air Force One separately. They later went to a Florida hospital together to visit victims of the Parklan school shooting.
The White House said Trump denied the New Yorker report, as he has done with news about Daniels, despite the fact that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen confirmed that he paid Daniels $130,000 out of his own pocket for her silence.
Those around McDougal said that she ended the relationship, which included meeting Trump’s sons, after thinking about “what her mother thought of her,” the report said.
The payment to keep McDougal silent was part of AMI’s “catch and kill” strategy to help Trump, the New Yorker report said.
AMI told the mag they didn’t run her account because they didn’t find it credible, and they gave her the money to do a fitness column for them.
They said any suggestion the deal gave them influence with Trump “while flattering, is laughable.”
AMI struck the deal with McDougal in August, and her first column appeared in November, after the Wall Street Journal did a story on her $150,000 deal.
She’s written a total of nine columns since.
A source who’s spoken to her said, “At $150,000 for nine columns she has to be one of the highest paid journalists in New York.”
McDougal says she worries what will happen now that she has decided to speak out, but says she was prompted to do so by the emergence of the Daniels revelations and the openness of the #MeToo movement.
She said that she hopes other women think twice before signing agreements that protect powerful men, something Ronan Farrow, the author of the New Yorker article, called “the moral compromises of silence.”
