On Thursday, former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal spoke publicly for the first time about an affair she says she had with Donald Trump starting in 2006. In a CNN interview, McDougal dished on her relationship with the president at length, including the detail that Trump once compared her to his daughter, Ivanka.
“He’s very proud of Ivanka, as he should be,” she told Anderson Cooper. “She’s a brilliant woman, she’s beautiful, you know, that’s his daughter and he should be proud of her. He said I was beautiful like her and, you know, ‘you’re a smart girl.’ There wasn’t a lot of comparing, but there was some. I heard a lot about her.”
McDougal also told Cooper she didn’t think it was odd that Trump would compare her to his daughter while they were having an affair — well, sort of. “You know, I know a lot of people think it’s odd,” she said. “There’s been some comments I’ve heard in the news he’s said about her, I think those comments are wrong, but do I think it’s strange that a father would love his daughter so much that he brags about her? No, I brag about my dog that much.”
The “comments” McDougal referred to include several occasions in which Trump has been recorded talking bluntly about his daughter’s sexual attractiveness. For instance in 2003, when he told Howard Stern that Ivanka had “the best body,” and then let Stern call Ivanka “a piece of ass.” And in 2006, during an appearance on “The View,” when Trump told the panel “I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
Of course, McDougal isn’t the only woman to say that Trump once compared her to his eldest daughter. Porn star Stormy Daniels, who also says she had an affair with POTUS in 2006, told InTouch in a 2011 interview that “[Trump] told me once that I was someone to be reckoned with, beautiful, smart, just like his daughter.” The Associated Press also reported in 2016 that eight former “The Apprentice” crew members said Trump repeatedly made lewd comments about a camerawoman, during which time he compared her beauty to that of Ivanka.