REX/Shutterstock
Ronan Farrow helped take down Harvey Weinstein and now the New Yorker writer has set his focus on a bigger prize… The President of the United of America. Farrow has detailed Donald Trump’s elaborate system to hide his extramarital relations before he became President in a 4,300 word article in the New Yorker.
Titled Donald Trump, a Playboy Model, and a System for Concealing Infidelity, Farrow has covered the way in which the former Apprentice host reportedly concealed an affair with Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal.
The explosive piece, which is largely based on account provided to Farrow by McDougal’s friend John Crawford, who provided him with an eight-page handwritten document outlining the affair. McDougal said the affair was consensual but the account lifts a lid on how Trump and his allies, including the National Enquirer, 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 details how Trump met McDougal in 2006 at the Playboy Mansion after filming an episode of his NBC reality series there. This was less than two years after Trump got married to Melania and a few months after the birth of his son, Barron.
It details how the National Enquirer publisher AMI, run by Trump’s friend David Pecker, paid McDougal $150,000 for exclusive rights to McDougal’s story, which it never ran.
In the article, McDougal declined to discuss the details of her relationship with Trump, for “fear” of violating her AMI contract. However, she told Farrow: “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.”
The latest allegations come as porn star Stormy Daniels, real name Stephanie Clifford, plans to tell all about her own affair with Trump after Trump lawyer Michael Cohen admitted paying her $130,000, a move her legal team claim voids her non-disclosure agreement.
A White House spokesperson told the New Yorker, in a statement, that Trump denies having had an affair with McDougal calling it, wait for it, “fake news”. “This is an old story that is just more fake news. The President says he never had a relationship with McDougal.”
[contf] [contfnew] 
Deadline
[contfnewc] [contfnewc]
