WASHINGTON: A Playboy model who says she had a months-long affair with Donald Trump a decade before his election as president told CNN that he tried to pay her for sex.
Karen McDougal wants to be released from a $150,000 deal she made in 2016 with American Media Inc, the company that owns the National Enquirer tabloid, an agreement she alleges was aimed at keeping her story under wraps.
“After we had been intimate, he, he tried to pay me. And I actually didn’t know how to take that,” McDougal told CNN’s Anderson Cooper of her first sexual encounter with Trump, which she said took place in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“I looked at him and said, ‘That’s not me, I’m not that kind of girl.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Oh,’ and he said, ‘You’re really special,'” McDougal said. While she initially did not plan to see him again, McDougal said she and Trump ultimately ended up spending “a lot of time together” and also kept in touch by phone.
“There was a real relationship there. There were feelings between the two of us,” she said. The pair met in 2006, shortly after Trump’s wife Melania gave birth to their son Baron. Trump only mentioned Melania once, and “obviously, there’s a reason I don’t bring her up, because I felt guilty about it,” McDougal said.
While the alleged affair dates to 2006, the agreement with American Media Inc was only made in 2016, when Trump was running for the presidency.
McDougal’s story echoes allegations of an affair between Trump and the porn actress Stephanie Clifford – known as Stormy Daniels – during the same period.
Daniels has filed suit seeking to be released from a non-disclosure agreement she signed in 2016, for which she was paid $130,000 by Trump’s personal lawyer.
