Ex-Playboy model claims having affair with Trump

A former Playboy model claimed that she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006 and has also described the US President's alleged system for concealing affairs, a media report said.

The New Yorker in the report on Friday said that Trump met Karen McDougal in June 2006 after he taped an episode of his reality-television show, "The Apprentice", at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

Late Playboy owner Hugh Hefner threw a pool party for the show's contestants with dozens of current and former Playmates in attendance including McDougal.

At the time of the party, Trump had been married to Slovenian model Melania Knauss, the future first lady, for less than two years and their son, Barron, was a few months old. 

In an eight-page, handwritten document obtained by The New Yorker, McDougal wrote that Trump "immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me... telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you... I think you could be his next wife.'"

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. 

But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs, sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously, out of the press, reports The New Yorker.

"No paper trails for him," McDougal wrote.

Meanwhile, a White House spokesperson on Friday night denied the affair in a statement to the magazine, reports CNN.

"This is an old story that is just more fake news. The President says he never had a relationship with McDougal," the spokesperson said.

After ending the affair in April 2007, McDougal signed a limited life-story rights agreement in August 2016, granting American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, exclusive ownership of her story for $150,000.

However, the company, run by David Pecker, a friend of Trump's, never ran her story and, according to The New Yorker, instead used the purchase to kill the piece. 

The company told the magazine it did not print it because it did not find McDougal's story to be credible.