Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Donald Trump, is taking a page straight out of the Stormy Daniels playbook.
According to a The New York Times report, McDougal filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to get out of her 2016 non-disclosure agreement, becoming the second woman in two weeks to filed a lawsuit accusing the president or his allies of trying to bury news about a Trump extramarital affair.
McDougal is suing American Media Inc., The National Enquirer’s parent company, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, paid her $150,000 to buy her story — but never ran it. The Enquirer’s chief executive, David Pecker, is a friend of Trump’s.
Porn star Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, said in a lawsuit filed March 6 that her “hush agreement” with Trump is invalid. Trump attorney Michael Cohen agreed in October 2016 to pay her $130,000 to keep her from talking about an extramarital affair she said she had with Trump just over a decade ago.
The White House did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment. But Trump has repeatedly denied both affairs.
In her lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, McDougal claims that Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, was in talks with American Media behind her back and that both AMI and her lawyer at the time misled her about the deal.
McDougal, who spoke to The New Yorker last month, after the publication obtained notes she took about Trump, said that A.M.I. “warned” that her breach of the non-disclosure agreement could result in “considerable monetary damages.”
McDougal’s lawyer, Peter K. Stris, told the Times, A.M.I. was engaging in “a multifaceted effort to silence” his client.
McDougal filed her suit just as Clifford is about to make her “60 Minutes” debut, which, according to The Washington Post, is tentatively scheduled to air this Sunday.
Trump’s team is seeking $20 million from Clifford, arguing she violated her non-disclosure.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that A.M.I., one of the country’s largest tabloid news providers, is known to buy damaging stories about allies for the sole purpose of burying them, a practice known as “catch and kill.”
McDougal says she had 9-month affair with Trump
Donald Trump had a nine-month affair with former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal in 2006 — two years into his marriage to Melania Trump — and built up an elaborate system to keep his infidelities out of the press, Ronan Farrow wrote in a blockbuster New Yorker article published early Friday.
McDougal confirmed a Wall Street Journal report from shortly before the 2016 election that she was paid $150,000 by National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc. for her account of any affair she had with a “then-married man.”
According to the New Yorker, that “then-married man” was Donald Trump, then a real estate mogul and star of NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
She wrote in an eight-page hand-written note obtained by the New Yorker that Trump met her at the Playboy Mansion in 2006, offered her money after the first time they had sex, showed her Melania’s separate bedroom in Trump Tower and reimbursed her for flights to avoid creating a paper trail.
She said she ended the affair in April 2007 after nine months — which means that her relationship would have overlapped with one that porn star Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) has claimed to have had with Trump in 2006.
A White House spokesperson denied an affair with McDougal in a statement to the New Yorker: “This is an old story that is just more fake news. The President says he never had a relationship with McDougal.”
The New Yorker also detailed McDougal’s $150,000 deal with AMI — whose CEO and chairman, David Pecker, has called Trump “a personal friend.” The company bought exclusive rights to her story but never published it, an arrangement that six former AMI employees said was a common practice known as “catch and kill.”
McDougal said she now regrets her deal with A.M.I., telling the New Yorker: “It took my rights away. At this point I feel I can’t talk about anything without getting into trouble, because I don’t know what I’m allowed to talk about. I’m afraid to even mention his name.”
A rep for AMI said that it didn’t publish McDougal’s story because it did not find it credible. McDougal was allowed to “respond to legitimate press inquiries” according to an amendment in her contract, the New Yorker wrote.
In a statement issue Friday, AMI also rejected the story’s underlying premise: “The New Yorker and Ronan Farrow’s suggestion that AMI engages in any practice that would allow it to hold influence over the President of the United States is laughable.” – WRAP
