New Details Reveal Affair Between Trump and Former Playboy Model

Karen McDougal's account of secret meetings and financial transactions designed to hide the affair.

karen mcdougal
Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model who allegedly had an affair with Donald Trump. (Getty Images)
Getty Images for Bacardi

In June 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of The Apprentice at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. At the time he had been married to Melania Knauss for less than two years, and their son, Barron, was a few months old. During the filming, he met Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who had been named Playmate of the Year eight years prior. The two started an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in a handwritten document that totals eight pages. John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s, provided The New Yorker with the document, which McDougal has confirmed as hers. The interactions she describes are strikingly similar to the stories of other women who claim to have had sexual relationships with Trump or have accused him of sexual misconduct. Though her relationship with Trump was entirely consensual, she describes how Trump and his allies used “clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.” Four days before the 2016 election, The Wall Street Journal reported that McDougal’s story was purchased by American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer. They had paid a $150,000 for exclusive rights to the story, which never ran. C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I., David Pecker, who calls Trump a “personal friend” often buys a story just to bury it. On August 5, 2016, McDougal signed a limited life-story rights agreement granting A.M.I. exclusive ownership of her account of any romantic, personal or physical relationship she has ever had with any “then-married man.” Her retainer with attorney Keith M. Davidson makes explicit that the man in question was Donald Trump. “I feel let down,” McDougal told The New Yorker. “I’m the one who took it, so it’s my fault, too. But I didn’t understand the full parameters of it.”

The InsideHook Newsletter.

News, advice and insights for the most interesting person in the room.