The case against Donald Trump is based on payments to Stormy Daniels, the wife of a former pornographic actress. Only the prosecutors have accused the other woman.
Court documents say there were payments made to Trump to “1 woman” — identified as Karen McDougal.
Karen is a former Playboy fashion model. Like Daniels, she also claims to have had sex with Trump.
He said their secret relationship lasted 10 months. Trump denies ever having an affair with the woman.
This is some of what we know about Karen McDougal and how she comes to this case.
Born in the US state of Indiana before moving to Michigan as a child, she began modeling competitively in her 20s.
She then made her way to Playboy where in 1998 she won the ‘Playmate of the Year’ award and was voted the best model of the 1990s behind Pamela Anderson.
She later worked as a fitness trainer and became the first woman to grace the cover of Men’s Fitness magazine in 1999. She also briefly became an actress.
In 2006, the New Yorker magazine wrote that, according to Karen, she met Trump at the Playboy studio in Los Angeles, where Trump was coming to do an interview for the video series, The Apprentice.
Karen says that Trump, who was married at the time, “liked me right away, kept talking to me – telling me how beautiful I was, etc.”
Karen McDougal claims that she and Trump were in a relationship for 10 months, and that they saw each other “at least five times a month”. She told CNN that their relationship was full of love and understanding.
In 2016, while running for president of the United States, Karen signed a contract worth $150,000 (over 160 million Frw) to exclusively tell her story to the entertainment magazine The National Enquirer.
The agreement required him not to speak publicly about the relationship.
However, the magazine never published her story, and Karen said she was tricked into keeping the story of her relationship with Trump out.
Buying a story to keep it out of the U.S. is known as “catch and kill” — and the National Enquirer is said to have done it to suppress any bad news about Trump.
In 2021, the United States Election Commission, which is responsible for compliance with the Election Finance Act, ruled that the media had acted illegally in paying for Karen’s story but kept it unpublished.
