Karen McDougal

At 53 years old, Karen McDougal has this physical status:

Karen McDougal (born March 23, 1971) is an American model and actress.

She is best known for her appearances in Playboy magazine as Playmate of the Month for December 1997 and 1998 Playmate of the Year.

McDougal was voted the runner-up of "The sexiest Playmate of the 1990s" by the readers of Playboy in 2001.McDougal taught pre-kindergarten before winning a swimwear competition that launched her career as a glamour, promotional, and swimsuit actress.

She has developed her career since her appearances in Playboy, including additional magazine modeling, television advertisements, and minor acting with mixed success.

She has starred in numerous magazine appearances, including as the first woman to be featured on the front page of Men's Fitness magazine.

She appeared in The Arena, a direct-to-video film that inspired the creation of a fantasy art statuette and a doll. McDougal is a fitness enthusiast who has participated in ballet study and high school sports from the start of his childhood.

She is a huge motorcycle and car enthusiast.

She has lived largely private life since her Playmate days.

The revelation of an unidentified affair with Donald Trump from 2006-07 and its subsequent suspected cover-up have thrust her into national spotlights long before and after the 2016 presidential election in the United States.

Early life

McDougal was born in Merrillville, Indiana, near Gary. She is of Cherokee, Scottish, and Irish descent. She is the eldest daughter in the family, with three older brothers, Bob, Dave, and Jeff, as well as Tina, the younger sister. Carol McDougal remarried when McDougal was nine years old, and the family moved to Sawyer, Michigan, where she remained until college.

As a child, McDougal studied tap dance and ballet. She had aspired to be a ballerina when she grew up before teaching and modeling. She graduated from River Valley High School as a cheerleader, a color guard, a volleyball and softball player, as well as Michigan state champion clarinet player four years in a row in high school. Due to her wholesome sweetness, her high school nickname was "Barbie." She attended Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, majoring in Elementary Education after graduating from high school in 1989.

McDougal taught preschool in a Detroit suburb for two years before being refused to enter a swimming competition. One of her professional goals has always been to open a learning center for children, but she has put those efforts on hold to concentrate on acting and modeling.

Personal life

At first, McDougal's family members were reluctant to accept her decision to register for Playboy. They eventually accepted the fact that her mother appeared in interview segments of her Playmate of the Year "Video Centerfold" as a sign of love. She had a healthy BMI of 19.19 when she was Playmate of the Year 1998.

In 2004, she purchased a pink custom-built motorcycle and entered an Easyriders-sponsored motorcycle competition in Pomona, California, where her motorcycle received the Best Radical Custom award. Despite otherwise seeing herself as a "healthy nut," she professes to be a chocoholic and junk food junkie. She practices five days a week to stay fit. Brittany and Brandy are both a pet lover and owned two cats. McDougal has two tattoos: one is a tattoo of a cat on the second toe of her right foot to honor her her cats, and the other is a cross in front of her right ear as a reminder of her spirituality.

McDougal lived in Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona, as of 2007. McDougal appeared in a topless pictorial and interview in Spanish magazine Interviu, in which she discussed her then-marriage with Bruce Willis.

McDougal's family has a history of breast cancer, and McDougal, who had breast implants, is a proponent of breast cancer awareness. Since her health worsened, she had her breast implants removed in January 2017.

McDougal said she has registered to vote as a Republican in 2018. Despite being a swimsuit model, she is not a good swimmer due to her aquaphobia.

McDougal had told a friend that she had a relationship with a married Donald Trump from 2006 to 2007, according to various sources, but it had lasted from ten months to a year. It also stated that American Media, Inc. (AMI), the National Enquirer's founder, had paid McDougal $150,000 for exclusive rights to her story but that it was never released it. AMI reported to The Wall Street Journal that it paid the money to McDougal not to kill damaging news about" Trump, but rather to provide "exclusive life rights to any relationship she has had with a then-married man" and "two years" worth of her fitness columns and magazine covers. Dylan Howard, AMI's chief content officer, interviewed McDougal for several hours at the firm's headquarters on June 20, 2016. McDougal later spoke with investigative reporters from ABC News, which led AMI to promise to buy McDougal's rights for $150,000 on August 5, 2016.

The Wall Street Journal first published the story four days before the 2016 United States presidential election, in which Trump was the Republican nominee. The National Enquirer recommended Trump as a member of AMI CEO/Chairman David Pecker and was a mentor of AMI CEO/Chairman David Pecker. Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign strategist, denied the existence of a link between Trump and McDougal, saying that the allegation was "completely false."

Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker wrote about the affair and AMI's purchase of the newspaper in February 2018, largely supporting the 2016 Wall Street Journal's assertion that the investigation had raged for nine months. The tale was based on McDougal's handwritten memoirs of the affair, which McDougal's friend lost to Farrow. McDougal told Farrow that she had written the memoirs. McDougal first met Trump in June 2006 at a party hosted by Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion, according to Farrow. Trump kept in touch with McDougal, and the first date was confirmed, and they had sex on the first date. She said she met relatives of her family and that he had promised to buy her an apartment in New York. When she landed to meet Trump, she prepaid him for the flight and hotel expenses, avoiding "paper trails." McDougal ended the affair in April 2007 because she felt uncomfortable sleeping with a married man; she was also offended by derogatory remarks she made about her mother and a Black man who was dating a female acquaintance of his.

McDougal refused to comment on the alleged affair due to her relationship with AMI, but she told Farrow that she regrets signing the deal, adding, "It took my rights away..." I'm not sure what I'm supposed to write about. "I'm afraid to even mention his name." Pecker has also mentioned that he has a "favorite tactic" of purchasing "a tale in order to bury it," Farrow said. AMI said it did not publish McDougal's story because it was not credible, and a White House spokesperson denied the investigation.

Anderson Cooper conducted an interview on March 22, 2018, where McDougal entails the whole affair and apologized to Melania Trump. Since they first had sex, Trump tried to give her money, she said, and that she had visited Trump "many times."

McDougal brought a lawsuit against AMI in Los Angeles Superior Court in March 2018, aiming to discredit the non-disclosure agreement. AMI reached an understanding with McDougal on April 19, 2018, which enabled her to comment on the suspected affair.

Michael Cohen, Trump's personal counsel, secretly recorded a discussion with him and Trump about paying McDougal in July 2018. Rudy Giuliani, who later appeared in a personal capacity, said that Trump did not know of the recording and gave two versions of the interview, first that the protagonists planned to compensate McDougal directly, then that they planned to pay AMI for the rights to McDougal's book. When responding to a Wall Street Journal story about Hicks' resignation by saying, "we have no knowledge of any of this."

The recording was released by Cohen's lawyer Lanny Davis on July 25, which was on television. Trump and Cohen can be seen discussing how to make a donation for "all of the details about our friend David," ostensibly referring to Pecker. Trump is also heard asking if "one-fifty" was needed to be paid, which Cohen confirms. According to reports, AMI paid McDougal $150,000 per year. On July 2, 2018, Davis said Cohen "achieved liberty" and was willing to admit the truth at this moment.

Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance rules in August 2018, appointing $130,000 and $150,000 "at the direction of a federal office" to two women who reported to the campaign "with the intention of influencing the election." Stormy Daniels and McDougal's salaries match those made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and McDougal. Daniels also confirmed that she and Trump had a 2006 affair. Trump denied Cohen's allegations by saying he learned of the payments "later" and that he paid Cohen personally, not out of campaign funds. According to Pecker, Howard and Allen Weisselberg (chief financial officer of The Trump Organization), they were given witness privilege in exchange for their testimony regarding the payments.

In May 2019, the Southern District of New York was investigating Trump's potential involvement in the concealment of hush money payments.

The House Judiciary Committee had been charged in September 2019, triggering an investigation into Trump's suspected complicity in the 2016 hush-money payments to McDougal and Stormy Daniels.

McDougal filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News on December 5, 2019. Tucker Carlson, the network anchor, defamed McDougal by claiming she had personally extorted Trump for the hush money she received in 2016. McDougal refutes this allegation. "The remarks are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary designed to frame a political debate, and are not actionable as defamation," Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee, dismissed the defamation case on September 24, 2020. The judge continued that the "general tenor" of the show should alert a viewer that [Carlson] is not'stating the truth' about the issues he addresses but instead engages in "exaggeration" and "non-literal commentary." "The vote is not limited to FOX News Media, but also for all First Amendment advocates," Fox News reported on the same day.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that the National Enquirer breached US election legislation in June 2021, with AMI's $150,000 to McDougal enforcing an unlawful campaign contribution. AMI has been fined $187,500. Because the FEC was split on party lines, it could not press forward with any probe into Trump, and, as a result, will not be charged or be the subject of further scrutiny by the FEC.

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