Sitting in a luxury hotel suite in West Hollywood, clad in a dressing gown and not much else, it’s clear to see how Karen McDougal might attract the attention of a rich, powerful, older man.
A man like former U.S. president, Donald Trump, for instance.
Karen is a former Playboy model who claims she had a ten-month affair with Trump in 2006.
She’s one of two women — the other being Stormy Daniels — who allegedly had a relationship with the married multi-millionaire and were subsequently paid substantial hush money prior to his successful 2016 election campaign.
It’s these women’s allegations that lie at the heart of the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation into 76-year-old Trump, the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges — 34 charges, to be precise — all of which he denies.
But while everyone has heard of Stormy Daniels — a former adult film star whose silence was bought for £104,000 by Trump’s former lawyer “fixer”, Michael Cohen, who was later jailed for tax evasion and election finance violations — few have heard of Karen McDougal.
Her story was similarly bought for £120,000 and buried, by an American tabloid, a strategy known as a “catch and kill”.
But unlike Stormy — who has left her contempt for Trump in no doubt, describing their alleged sexual encounter as “the worst 90 seconds of my life”— Karen insists, in her first interview with a British newspaper, that their relationship was real and loving.
It’s easy to see how Trump might have fallen for her.
Now 52, with cascades of brunette hair and the figure of a woman half her age, she’s smart and feisty — a “bunny” with a brain — with a sharp wit.
I ask how she feels about the former president denying their ten-month affair: Trump has rubbished both Karen and Stormy’s claims, and says the criminal charges are part of a “political witch hunt” to stop him from running for office again.
“His people have denied it, but he’s never denied it,” she corrects me.
“A reporter asked him if he had an affair with Karen McDougal, and all he said was: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’ He knows I’m telling the truth.”
She has a point.
For a while Trump has mocked Stormy Daniels, calling her “horse face” and “a total con job” and has bad-mouthed E. Jean Carroll — the advice columnist who was awarded five million in damages last week after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming her — as a “whack job”, he has never said anything derogatory about Karen.
While we’re on the subject, there are a few other assumptions Karen would like cleared up.
First, theirs was not a casual affair; it was a “He said he loved me and showed me off to his friend.”
Trump and I weren’t a fling, we were in love.
I was the one who dumped him – and went off with Bruce Willis.
She’s the ex-Playboy Bunny at the centre of a dramatic court case that could wreck the ex-president’s new election bid.
Now Karen McDougal testifies – to the Mail about the serious romance, she insists “I was in love with him. He was in love with me. I know that because he told me all the time. He’d say: ‘You’re my baby and I love you.’ He showed me off to his friends.”
And second, she says, she dumped him: “I’m portrayed as the disgruntled woman, but I am not — I ended it.”
She had been thinking of ways to get out of the relationship, she says: “A family member came to town and we went to a bar and I met a lovely man named Bruce.”
The Bruce she refers to is Die Hard star Bruce Willis, with whom she was pictured, hand-in-hand, in Italy and St Tropez in 2007, and whom she dated for six months.
“I wasn’t cheating on Trump, but Bruce and I were talking on the phone a lot, so that made it easier to end it. Why would I stay with a married man when Bruce was a nice guy, and single?” She reasons.
How she came to cross the path of the one-time most powerful man in the world sounds like an “American Dream” type story.
One of five children brought up in a working-class family in Michigan, Karen was teaching four-year-olds at a pre-school when, having had her breasts surgically enhanced from 34B to 34D, she entered a swimsuit competition.
The competition took her all the way to Playboy magazine, where she was named Playmate of the Month for December 1997, Playmate of the Year in 1998 and in 2001 the magazine’s readers voted her runner-up for Playmate of the 1990s, behind former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson.
Karen had her implants removed in 2016 over health concerns.
In 2006, Trump, who was then the star of the TV show, Celebrity Apprentice, attended a pool party at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, hosted by Hugh Hefner for the show’s contestants.
He’d been married to wife Melania for less than two years at the time, and she’d just given birth to their son, Barron.
Nevertheless, Karen says she caught Trump’s eye.
“He followed me around like a puppy dog, trying to get my attention,” she says.
“He took to me so much that the Bunny Mother said: ‘Wow, he really has a thing for you.’ I was saying goodbye and he was standing next to his bodyguard Keith Schiller and he said: ‘Keith, get her number.’ He called a few days later and asked me to have dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” she says.
“I’m ashamed now because I knew he was married, but I was a different girl then, having fun and not thinking about things too deeply.”
Keith was duly dispatched to pick her up but, to Karen’s surprise, she was driven to the back entrance of the hotel — she obviously had to be kept under wraps.
Instead of dinner in the restaurant, they had steak and mashed potatoes delivered by room service to the bungalow where Trump was staying.
“We ate at a little table in the kitchen area with the TV on in the background,” she remembers.
“After dinner, Trump made his move. I was attracted to him, but it wasn’t like I was looking to jump into bed with him — on the first night especially,” she says.
But jump into bed they did, she says.
Afterwards, she was horrified when Trump offered her money.
“I was dressed and ready to go, and I saw this stack of cash in his hand,” she recalls.
“I said I’m not that kind of girl.
“He knew he’d made a mistake when he saw how upset I was. He told me I was really special.”
Nevertheless, she “cried all the way” as Keith drove her home.
“I didn’t think I’d see Trump again, but we got past it. I got another call asking me to dinner. I don’t know why, but I said yes.”
They embarked, she claims, on a consensual affair, meeting five or more times a month.
Their first outing together was to an event in Lake Tahoe in July 2006, where Stormy Daniels claims she had sex with Trump.
“I don’t know how he squeezed that in,” Karen comments, raising her perfectly arched eyebrows.
“If it happened, it must have been the day before I arrived, or the day after I left, because I thought I was with him all the time.”
She also accompanied him to Trump golf courses in New Jersey and California, and he showed her around his three-storey penthouse in Trump Tower in Manhattan.
“As we passed staff in the building, I asked: ‘Aren’t you afraid they’re going to say something?’ And Trump said: ‘Nah, they won’t say anything’. Nothing happened there,” she says.
“I was desperate to get out because I was in another woman’s house. I was uncomfortable.”
Throughout their alleged affair, Karen says she made her own travel arrangements.
“I paid for my flights and hotels, and he reimbursed me in cash,” she explains.
“It was so there wouldn’t be any paper trail — no proof.”
She also met — and was photographed with — Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jnr, and daughter, Ivanka, which is when she says the guilt intensified.
Action man Bruce Willis hovering in the background probably helped, too — and she decided to end things.
So how did that go down?
“My mother didn’t like us being together and I used that as the excuse,” she tells me.
“He said: ‘What? That old hag?’ I was angry. I told him: That’s my mother and don’t disrespect her. I pointed out that they are the same age.”
Karen’s mother, Carol, is just six days older than Trump.
“He wasn’t happy. He doesn’t like being rejected but he didn’t try to persuade me to come back.”
In 2015, however, Karen heard he was running for president.
“He once said to me: ‘I’d make a great president, wouldn’t I?’ And I said yes, but I didn’t think he was taking it seriously,” she comments.
She says she was shocked when her former lover won the Republican nomination.
As the spotlight intensified, whispers of their alleged affair began to get out, and Karen says she was approached by U.S. tabloid, the National Enquirer, owned by media company AMI, whose ex-chief executive was David Pecker, a friend of Trump.
Through her lawyer, she agreed a fee of $150,000 (£120,000) for a deal that she thought would be to write columns about health and fitness for a variety of the company’s magazines.
The story of her alleged affair would not be published.
“That suited me because I hadn’t really wanted the story to get out. I didn’t know the term catch and kill at that point,” she says.
Karen did not know that the magazine was said by prosecutors to be working in concert with Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen.
Prosecutors claimed in a charging document earlier this month that Trump did not want the story about Karen to get out “because he was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy.”
The document alleges that it was agreed Trump would reimburse AMI for their payment to Karen, but Pecker opted not to seek repayment after talking with a company lawyer.
The U.S. Federal Election Commission ruled in 2021 that AMI’s payment to Karen amounted to an illegal campaign contribution, and fined its successor company £150,500.
Trump has denied any involvement in payments to either Karen or Stormy Daniels.
He’s described the criminal charges against him as “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history”.
His trial is expected to take place early next year.
“If I was subpoenaed as a witness, of course I’d co-operate,” says Karen.
Karen says she was shocked by some of Trump’s behaviour in the last presidential campaign.
“I was horrified when he made fun of that disabled journalist,” she says, referring to Serge Kovaleski who has Arthrogryposis, a congenital condition affecting the joints.
She was “disgusted” by the Access Hollywood “grab them by the p***y” tape.
Nevertheless, she did vote for him in the 2016 election, because she’s a life-long Republican.
“He can be crass and vulgar, but when he has his kind moments, it’s lovely to see because it shows there’s still a human in there. He needs to have more compassion for people in general — a lot more,” she admonishes.
As for E. Jean Carroll, Karen says she has nothing but admiration for her: “I’m glad she stood up for herself and got justice.”
When I ask if she will vote for Trump if he wins the next Republican nomination, her answer is not exactly a ringing endorsement.
“I’m hoping DeSantis gets in — I’d be willing to work for his campaign,” she says, referring to Ron DeSantis, the popular governor of Florida, who is expected to declare next week that he will run for the top job.
It’s been 17 years since Karen and Trump met at that Playboy pool party, and it seems unfortunate that she has never been able to escape the consequences.
“Absolutely. It has changed my life,” Karen agrees.
“I’ve lost work, lost friends and I’ve been smeared as an extortionist and a gold-digger. I am neither of those things. But I’m stronger; I’ve grown from this. I’m a different woman.”
Before leaving, I ask Karen what she’d do if she ever met Trump on the street.
She smiles before replying: “I’d say hello — and keep walking.”
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