Another discredited Trump accuser…
How many more of these women will the leftist media parade out, with decades-old stories of affairs with Donald Trump before they start to see a backlash from the American public, who no longer believes a word they publish?
According to Fox News, the centerpiece of a New Yorker story on Karen McDougal, who says she had an affair with Donald Trump, is scribbled notes kept by the former Playboy playmate.
These notes, obtained by journalist Ronan Farrow, are presented as her personal reflections on the relationship –“later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to the New Yorker.”
Readers could easily get the impression, as many journalists have, that McDougal wrote these notes during what she describes as a consensual relationship that began in 2006. But that is not the case.
A telltale marking on the entries, reproduced by the magazine, shows that McDougal wrote these pages either during or since the 2016 campaign—relying on memories that were at least a decade old.
The New Yorker does not dispute that McDougal’s notes were written many years after the alleged relationship. Instead, the magazine attempted to tie them to McDougal’s eventual deal with the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc.
The more recent creation of the notes doesn’t mean that McDougal isn’t telling the truth. The magazine’s view is that the timing has no material impact on her credibility.
But the timing of the notes is revealing about how McDougal came to go public, as well as about the role of the National Enquirer.
The McDougal passages were written on a notebook marketed by fashion designer Izak Zenou, whose name appears at the bottom of one of the pages. He got into the business of creating office supplies in 2016, and the notebook was not available for sale on Amazon until March 2016.
The timing is significant.
Farrow writes that “the interactions that McDougal outlines in the document share striking similarities with the stories of other women who claim to have had sexual relationships with Trump, or who have accused him of propositioning them for sex or sexually harassing them.”
After the New Yorker story was published last week, a White House spokesperson said: “This is an old story that is just more fake news. The president says he never had a relationship with McDougal.”
The New Yorker expanded on what the Wall Street Journal had reported days before Trump’s election: that the Enquirer’s parent company had paid McDougal $150,000 for limited life rights to her story about any romantic or physical relationship with a married man, and never published it. The practice, in the tabloid world, is known as “catch and kill”—buying a story for the purpose of burying it.
American Media’s CEO, David Pecker, has acknowledged his friendship with Trump. The New Yorker quotes former two former AMI executives on the record as saying that buying and killing stories was a common practice under Pecker.
McDougal and her lawyer met with Dylan Howard, American Media’s chief content officer, to discuss a deal. McDougal told AMI that she had been offered more than $1 million for her story, and also that she was in discussions with ABC News.
The Enquirer maintains that it didn’t publish McDougal’s allegations about Trump in 2016 because it couldn’t confirm them, and that she offered no documentation, texts, receipts or corroborating witnesses. She was even told to search her storage for old phones or other evidence.
The supermarket tabloid also says she did not offer any handwritten notes, which suggests they hadn’t been written at the time.
