A former Playboy model said she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, according to an article by The New Yorker published on Friday.
The article also details an exclusive contract with a tabloid, saying she couldn’t talk about the affair to anyone else — even though the tabloid didn’t publish the story.
The article in the New Yorker relies on the first-hand account of Karen McDougal, a former Playmate of the Year, who recounts the consensual affair she had with Trump before he was elected president.
The article’s author said he received an eight-page handwritten note detailing the affair from a friend of McDougal. The former model confirmed it was her handwriting, he said.
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A White House spokesperson told the magazine in a statement that Trump denies having had an affair. “This is an old story that is just more fake news. The president says he never had a relationship with McDougal.”
The New Yorker published details about the letter, which says McDougal met Trump during a taping of his reality television show, The Apprentice, at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in June 2006.
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.’”
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The New Yorker said Trump had been married to his current wife Melania for less than two years at the time, and their son, Barron, was a few months old.
In one section of the letter, McDougal wrote that 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. After, we got dressed (to leave) and he offered me money. I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, ‘No thanks — I’m not that girl!’”
The former playmate describes the nine-month affair as entirely consensual, but “her account provides a detailed look at 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,” the article stated.
The article said that Trump flew McDougal to public events across the country but hid the fact that he paid for her travel. “No paper trails for him,” McDougal wrote. “In fact, every time I flew to meet him, I booked/paid for flight + hotel + he reimbursed me.”
She told the The New Yorker she ended the relationship in April 2007.
On Nov. 4, 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported that the National Enquirer paid a $150,000 for exclusive rights to McDougal’s story, which it never ran.
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McDougal said when the National Enquirer bought the story she was not able to talk about the affair or else she would violate an agreement reached with the company, the New Yorker reported, but The Enquirer did not print the story because it did not find it credible.
Stormy Daniels
The story has similarities to another alleged affair: adult film star Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels.
Last month, In Touch Weekly published an interview conducted in 2011 with Clifford in which she revealed a relationship with Trump.
The interview details her meeting with Trump at a golf tournament five years earlier, when he asked her to dinner. She says she met him that night for dinner in his hotel room, and he asked her “business” questions about her profession. She also described her single sexual encounter with Trump.
Employees told the Associated Press at the time that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen sent emails to the magazine’s lawyers and threatened to pursue legal action if the story was published.
Despite Clifford’s first-person details on Trump, former employees said the decision not to run the story in 2011 was a justifiable business decision because Trump did not have the same star appeal as more famous celebrities at the time.
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