The woman at the center of the latest allegations of an affair and cover-up attempt involving President Donald Trump is a former Michigan preschool teacher.
The latest Ronan Farrow bombshell story for the New Yorker, published Friday morning, details a nine-month relationship between Karen McDougal, a 1998 Playboy Playmate of the Year, and the then-married Trump.
Farrow focuses mostly on the Trump team's elaborate steps to hide the affair by using "clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs — sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously — out of the press."
A White House spokesperson denied the affair in a statement contained in the New Yorker story: “This is an old story that is just more fake news. The President says he never had a relationship with McDougal.”
McDougal is described in Farrow's story as growing up in a small town in Michigan and being a preschool teacher before her modeling career.
Her Playboy bio from 1998 states she was born in Gary, Ind. — though some reports say Merriville, Ind. — and moved to Michigan with her family when she was in fourth grade. According to the magazine, she graduated from high school in 1989, attended Ferris State University and moved to Detroit after college to teach preschool.
Around that time, she entered a "Venus Swimwear contest at a local nightclub" that ended up taking her to Florida for the finals, where she was discovered by a Playboy photographer.
The Free Press reported in November 1997 that McDougal, then age 26 and Playboy magazine's Miss December, was from Sawyer, Mich., a small Berrien County town of about 500 people.
Asked how the town was handling her centerfold, McDougal told the Free Press, "With shock. I was always wholesome little Karen. ... But I think it's going to work out. Now that people are getting used to the idea, they're treating me like a celebrity."
McDougal met Trump in 2006 at the Playboy Mansion, according to Farrow's account. At the time, Trump had been wed to his current wife, Melania, for less than two years. The affair allegedly lasted for nine months.
Farrow writes that in November 2016, "four days before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, had paid $150,000 for exclusive rights to McDougal’s story, which it never ran."
It's a tabloid strategy that's sometimes referred to as ''“catch and kill.'”
McDougal told Farrow her decision to speak out was impacted by the #metoo movement and also her experiences with health issues that she attributes to breast implants she had removed last year.
“As I was sick and feeling like I was dying and bedridden, all I could do was pray to live. But now I pray to live right, and make right with the wrongs that I have done,” she said.
In 2017, Farrow did some of the most significant reporting about Harvey Weinstein's alleged sexual misconduct for the New Yorker. His new story arrives on the heels of reports about Trump's alleged encounter with adult film star Stormy Daniels and the payment of $130,000 to her as hush money.
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